Two-dimensional energy dispersion in thermally annealed epitaxial nitrogen atomic sheet in GaAs

We fabricated an epitaxial nitrogen (N) atomic sheet embedded in GaAs and performed a rapid thermal annealing (RTA) for inducing N rearrangement on the (001)-growth plane. Both the photoluminescence (PL) intensity of the N atomic sheet originated from an interaction among the fourth-nearest-neighbor N pairs and its thermal activation energy increased by the RTA. Furthermore, the delocalized electronic states became dominant by the RTA according to the PL-decay profiles. The linear increase in the radiative lifetime with the temperature indicates a formation of the two-dimensional energy dispersion by the RTA.