Optical method of atomic ordering estimation

It is well known that within metal-organic vapor-phase epitaxy (MOVPE) grown semiconductor III-V ternary alloys atomically ordered regions are spontaneously formed during the epitaxial growth. This ordering leads to bandgap reduction and to valence bands splitting, and therefore to anisotropy of the photoluminescence (PL) emission polarization. The same phenomenon occurs within quaternary semiconductor alloys. While the ordering in ternary alloys is widely studied, for quaternaries there have been only a few detailed experimental studies of it, probably because of the absence of appropriate methods of its detection. Here we propose an optical method to reveal atomic ordering within quaternary alloys by measuring the PL emission polarization.