COMPARISON OF THE SIDEWALL RECOMBINATION IN DRY AND WET ETCHED INGAASINP WIRES/

We have investigated the influence of the sidewall recombination on th e photoluminescence intensity of wet and dry etched InGaAs/InP wires w ith widths between 60 nm and 10 mum for a wide range of excitation den sities. While we obtain a large sidewall recombination velocity in the range of 10(7) cm/sec at low excitation density, the decay of the emi ssion intensity with decreasing wire width is completely suppressed at higher excitation density due to the saturation of nonradiative recom bination centers. Varying the bias voltage of the dry etching process from 80 V up to 300 V we observe a significant increase of the sidewal l recombination of dry etched structures at ion energies above 200 eV.