Rapid thermal annealing with incoherent light was used to fabricate planar, Be‐implantedp‐njunctions in GaAs. Diodes of varying diameter were used to determine if the residual implant damage would cause the space‐charge recombination current to dominate the surface recombination current. Unpassivated diodes are dominated by surface recombination over the 20–150 &mgr;m range of diameters investigated. Passivation of diode structures with a surface layer of high‐resistivity Al0.4Ga0.6As grown by metalorganic chemical vapor deposition resulted in a significant reduction of surface recombination current and permitted the measurement of the space‐charge recombination current. The space‐charge recombination current for these diodes was found to be similar in value to that previously reported for Zn‐diffused GaAs junctions.