Polarized emission from hexagonal-silicon-germanium nanowires

We present polarized emission from single hexagonal silicon-germanium (hex-SiGe) nanowires. To understand the nature of the band-to-band emission of hex-SiGe, we have performed photoluminescence spectroscopy to investigate the polarization properties of hex-SiGe core-shell nanowires. We observe a degree of polarization of 0.2 to 0.32 perpendicular to the nanowire c-axis. Finite-difference time-domain simulations were performed to investigate the influence of the dielectric contrast of nanowire structures. We find that the dielectric contrast significantly reduces the observable degree of polarization. Taking into account this reduction, the experimental data are in good agreement with polarized dipole emission perpendicular to the c-axis, as expected for the fundamental band-to-band transition, the lowest energy direct band-to-band transition in the hex-SiGe band structure.