Thermal quenching of the defect-related photoluminescence (PL) has been widely used to determine the fundamental properties of point defects in GaN such as the activation energy (E _t ) and capture cross section. However, in the present work, we have shown using drift-diffusion modeling and experimental analysis that the thermal quenching of defect-related PL from GaN does not only depend of the defect parameters but also is strongly governed by the carrier drift and diffusion in the depletion region. In particular, we have found that these processes significantly influence the slope of PL thermal quenching and temperature T ₀ at which the quenching begins. As a result, E _t obtained from the Arrhenius plot of the defect-related PL intensity in GaN provides the correct values of the defect activation energy only in the case of low surface state density ( cm⁻²eV⁻¹) corresponding to the weak surface band bending. However, in the case of high D ₀ giving rise to the significant surface band bending, the E _t value should be cautiously interpreted because it may not correspond entirely to the real defect activation energy due to the drift-diffusion process. Finally, we have shown that our finding can explain in a coherent manner various anomalous behaviors of PL thermal quenching reported in the literature, such as tunable, abrupt or sample dependent thermal quenching. We believe that our findings can be very interesting for nitride growth technology community and optoelectronic device applications.

缺陷相关的光致发光（PL）的热淬灭已被广泛用于确定GaN中点缺陷的基本特性，例如活化能（E _t）和捕获截面。然而，在目前的工作中，我们已经使用漂移扩散模型和实验分析表明，GaN中与缺陷相关的PL的热猝灭不仅取决于缺陷参数，而且还受载流子在衬底中的漂移和扩散的强烈控制。耗尽区。特别是，我们发现这些过程会显着影响PL热淬火的斜率和淬火开始的温度T ₀。结果，E _t 从GaN中与缺陷相关的PL强度的Arrhenius图获得的结果仅在对应于弱表面带弯曲的低表面态密度（cm ^-2 eV ^-1）的情况下才提供正确的缺陷激活能值。但是，在高D ₀引起明显的表面带弯曲的情况下，E _t 应谨慎解释该值，因为由于漂移扩散过程，它可能不完全对应于实际的缺陷激活能。最后，我们表明，我们的发现可以以连贯的方式解释文献中报道的PL热猝灭的各种异常行为，例如可调，突变或依赖于样品的热猝灭。我们相信我们的发现对于氮化物生长技术界和光电器件应用而言可能是非常有趣的。