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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 February 2011
Due to its favorable electronic and thermal properties GaN has been considered as a rare-earth host material for solid state amplifier and laser applications. To this end, we performed spatially resolved combined excitation emission spectroscopy (CEES) on Nd ions which were in-situ-doped into GaN epitaxial films grown by plasma assisted molecular beam epitaxy (PA-MBE) on c-plane sapphire substrate. For a wide range of concentration (up to 8at%) we find in the emission a dominant incorporation site, which can be identified with good certainty as a substitutional ‘Ga’ site. Energy levels and electron-phonon coupling to a localized mode can be identified. For the majority site, confocal spectral imaging under selective excitation show changes in emission intensity, excitation and emission wavelength on a submicron length scale suggesting spatial inhomogeneities in terms of Nd3+ ion concentration.