Photoluminescence dynamics of weakly confined excitons in GaAs thin films

We investigate the dynamics of weakly confined excitons in GaAs thin films measured by time-resolved photoluminescence (PL) technique. When excitation energy was above the resonant energy of the exciton, a long PL rise time of about 200 ps was observed. It is considered that an exciton formation process from excited continuum energy states to discrete energy states of the exciton in the thin film causes the slow PL rise. The observed PL decay time constant was about 14 ns due to high quality fabricated samples. The observed population dynamics can be surely ascribed to the specific features of weakly confined excitons.