Electrically conductive ZnO/GaN distributed Bragg reflectors grown by hybrid plasma-assisted molecular beam epitaxy

III-nitride-based vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers have so far used intracavity contacting schemes since electrically conductive distributed Bragg reflectors (DBRs) have been difficult to achieve. A promising material combination for conductive DBRs is ZnO/GaN due to the small conduction band offset and ease of n-type doping. In addition, this combination offers a small lattice mismatch and high refractive index contrast, which could yield a mirror with a broad stopband and a high peak reflectivity using less than 20 DBR-pairs. A crack-free ZnO/GaN DBR was grown by hybrid plasma-assisted molecular beam epitaxy. The ZnO layers were approximately 20 nm thick and had an electron concentration of 1×10 cm−3, while the GaN layers were 80-110 nm thick with an electron concentration of 1.8×10 cm−3. In order to measure the resistance, mesa structures were formed by dry etching through the top 3 DBR-pairs and depositing non-annealed Al contacts on the GaN-layers at the top and next to the mesas. The measured specific series resistance was dominated by the lateral and contact contributions and gave an upper limit of ∼10−3 Ω cm for the vertical resistance. Simulations show that the ZnO electron concentration and the cancellation of piezoelectric and spontaneous polarization in strained ZnO have a large impact on the vertical resistance and that it could be orders of magnitudes lower than what was measured. This is the first report on electrically conductive ZnO/GaN DBRs and the upper limit of the resistance reported here is close to the lowest values reported for III-nitride-based DBRs.