Carrier cooling in direct bandgap hexagonal silicon-germanium nanowires

Abstract

Direct bandgap group IV semiconductors, like strained Ge, GeSn, or hexagonal SiGe, are considered promising for photonic integration on silicon. For group IV semiconductor lasers, it is crucial to understand the carrier cooling efficiency toward the band edges. From a fundamental perspective, a study of carrier cooling within the Γ-valley of direct bandgap group IV semiconductors is particularly interesting since the Fröhlich interaction is expected to be very weak or even absent in these materials due to the nonpolar lattice. Intravalley carrier relaxation within the Γ-valley of a nonpolar semiconductor has not been experimentally accessible before since it has always been overshadowed by intervalley processes between energetically close indirect conduction band minima. Here, we study carrier cooling in direct bandgap hexagonal silicon-germanium (hex-SiGe) nanowires, allowing us to study carrier cooling in an isolated Γ-valley that is sufficiently separated from the indirect minima. We obtain a hot carrier cooling time of 180 ps in the Γ-valley of hex-SiGe. Although the cooling is much slower than in bulk polar group III/V materials due to the absence of Fröhlich interaction, it is comparable to the cooling time in an InGaAs MQW laser structure. We conclude that carrier cooling does not inherently limit hex-SiGe to serve as a laser gain material. This result is an important insight into the field of group IV semiconductor lasers.