Red shift of near band edge emission in cerium implanted GaN

Rare earth (RE) doping in GaN is a promising technology to control the optical properties. However, there are no reports on doping of cerium (Ce) into GaN, which is a very unique RE element. In this paper, we performed photoluminescence (PL) and optical transmission measurements on Ce-doped GaN for the first time. A significant red shift of about 120 meV was observed in the PL peak position of the donor bound excitons. This red shift of near band emission was corroborated by the red shift of the absorption edge related to GaN in the optical transmission measurements. This observation is attributed to the band gap narrowing in GaN heavily doped with Ce. The activation energy of the Ce-related shallow donor is found to be 21.9 meV in GaN.