Carrier confinement and alloy disorder exacerbate Auger-Meitner recombination in AlGaN ultraviolet light-emitting diodes

Abstract

The quantum efficiency of AlGaN ultraviolet light-emitting diodes (LEDs) declines (droops) at increasing operating powers due to Auger-Meitner recombination (AMR). Using first-principles density-functional theory, we show that indirect AMR mediated by electron-phonon coupling and alloy disorder can induce bulk $C$ coefficients as large as $\sim10^{-31}$ cm$^6$/s. Furthermore, we find that the confinement of carriers by polarization fields within quantum wells severely relaxes crystal-momentum conservation, which exacerbates the rate of AMR over radiative recombination by an order of magnitude relative to the bulk. This results in a striking decrease in quantum efficiency at high power. Suppressing polarization fields and jointly increasing the well width would greatly mitigate AMR and efficiency droop.