GaN belongs to the group III nitrides and is today the material of choice for efficient blue light emission, enabling solid state white lighting by combining red, blue and green light emitting diodes (LED) or by having a blue LED illuminating a phosphor. By combining GaN quantum well (QW) structures with colloids, nanoparticles or polyfluorene films, LEDs may be fabricate at lower cost. Such hybrid structures are promising for future micro-light sources in full-color displays, sensors and imaging systems. In this work, hybrid structures based on an MOCVD grown GaN QW sandwiched between two layers of AlGaN have been studied. On top of the structure, colloidal ZnO nano-crystals were deposited by spin-coating. Time-resolved photoluminescence was used to investigate the QW exciton dynamics in these hybrids depending on the cap layer thickness. From comparison of the recombination rate in the bare QW structure and the hybrid, the efficiency of the non-radiative resonant energy transfer between the QW and the nano-crystals could be obtained.

Bulk GaN of large area is difficult to synthesize. Thus, due to lack of native substrates, GaN-based structures are grown on SiC or sapphire, which results in high threading dislocation density in the active layer of the device. Fabricating GaN nanorods (NR) can be a way to produce GaN with lower defect density since threading dislocations are annihilated toward the NR wall during growth. Here, GaN(0001) NRs grown on Si(111) substrates by magnetron sputter epitaxy using a liquid Ga target have been investigated. Sputter deposition has the advantage of being easy to scale up for depositions on large surfaces. It is also possible to deposit at lower temperatures, which allows the use of substrates with lower decomposition temperature. In the second paper of this thesis, optical and structural properties of sputtered GaN NRs have been studied.