Hardening of GaAs by solute-vacancy pairs

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Abstract
The effect of various thermal and thermomechanical treatments on the yield stress and the dislocation substructure of heavily Si‐doped GaAs is presented. It is shown that the yield stress at 400 °C of samples annealed at 1100 °C, quenched and subsequently aged at an intermediate temperature, increases with increasing aging time, and for constant aging time, decreases with increasing temperature. A defect model based on the principles of chemical thermodynamics of imperfections is proposed to calculate the concentrations of the various possible defect species in Si‐doped GaAs as a function of temperature. The correlation between the concentrations of the various defects and the mechanical behavior observed in this investigation along with the optical and electrical measurements and the microstructural observations of previous investigators demonstrates the important role of solute‐vacancy pairs in determining a variety of properties. The solute‐vacancy pair model may be applied to explain the mechanical behavior of undoped GaAs and GaAs doped with Te, Ge, Sn, S, Cr, and Zn as well as the mechanical behavior of other compound semiconductors.