Suppression of strain relaxation and roughening of InGaAs on GaAs using ion-assisted molecular beam epitaxy
- 29 August 1994
- journal article
- Published by AIP Publishing in Applied Physics Letters
- Vol. 65 (9) , 1136-1138
- https://doi.org/10.1063/1.112951
Abstract
InxGa1−xAs films with x=0.67 and 0.75 were grown on GaAs (001) using molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) and ion-assisted MBE. The MBE films roughened and relaxed at 2–4 monolayers, after an initial coherently strained layer-by-layer growth stage, in good agreement with previous results. Ion energies <16 eV had little effect on growth. However, increasing the ion energy from 16 to 27 eV during ion-assisted MBE decreased the rate of strain relaxation and decreased the surface roughness. For x=0.75 and ion energies ≳27 eV, relaxation was eliminated to thicknesses of 50 monolayers, well beyond the Matthews–Blakeslee prediction. We infer from the results that surface roughening of large-mismatch MBE InGaAs films allows strain relaxation well before misfit dislocations are introduced.Keywords
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