A new analysis method to characterize the S-band luminescence decay of porous Si

Analysis of the non-exponential luminescence decay and extraction of additi onal physical information from it are important issues for the spectroscopi c study of porous Si. In this work a new approach to extract the decay time distribution function is proposed, based on the fact that the non-exponent ial luminescence decay of porous Si is a multiple exponential. It was found that the integrated intensities of different exponential components could be fitted by a Gaussian distribution function, characterized by tau(0), the decay time with maximum probability, and d, the width of the Gaussian dist ribution function. The parameters tau(0) and d were found to vary with emis sion wavelengths, tau(0) decreases exponentially with an increase of the em ission energy and d has a smaller value in the middle of the emission wavel engths. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.