Investigation on many-body effects in micro-LEDs under ultra-high injection levels

Micro-LEDs can work under an extremely high injection level and are widely used in high-brightness micro-displays and visible light communication. With the increase of carrier concentration, many-body effects gradually become important factors affecting devices’ characteristics. Considering the effects of carrier scattering, bandgap renormalization, and Coulomb enhancement (CE), changes in the electroluminescence spectra of micro-LEDs are analyzed as the current density increases from 49.2 to 358.2 kA/cm 2 , the latter representing an ultra-high injection level. Affected by plasma screening, CE decreases below about 150 kA/cm 2 . After that, polarization screening dominates and effectively alleviates the spatial separation of electrons and holes, which results in CE increases to the maximum injection level of 358.2 kA/cm 2 . It is established that CE promotes radiative recombination processes. Different from the traditional phenomenon of “efficiency droop”, the enhanced attraction between carriers leads to an abnormal increase of external quantum efficiency at high current density.