Photoreflectance and contactless electroreflectance spectroscopy of GaAs-based structures: The below band gap oscillation features

GaAs-based structures characterized below band gap oscillation features (OFs) in photoreflectance (PR) are studied in both PR and contactless electro-reflectance (CER) spectroscopies. It has been shown that the OFs are usually very strong for structures grown on n-type GaAs substrate. The origin of the OFs is the modulation of the refractive index in the sample due to a generation of additional carriers by the modulated pump beam. The presence of OFs in PR spectra complicates the analysis of PR signal related to quantum well transitions. Therefore, PR spectroscopy is often limited to samples grown on semi-insolating (SI) type substrates. However, sometimes the OFs could be observed for structures grown on SI-type GaAs substrates. In this paper we show that the OFs could be successfully eliminated by applying the CER technique instead of PR one because during CER measurements any additional carriers are not generated and hence CER spectra are free of OFs. This advantage of CER spectroscopy is very important in investigations of all structures for which OFs are present in PR spectra.