TEMPERATURE DEPENDENCE OF THE GROWTH MODE DURING HOMOEPITAXY ON PATTERNED GALLIUM ARSENIDE (001); ATOMIC-SCALE MECHANISMS FOR UNSTABLE GROWTH.

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2006-12-11

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Title of Document: TEMPERATURE DEPENDENCE OF THE GROWTH MODE DURING HOMOEPITAXY ON PATTERNED GALLIUM ARSENIDE (001); ATOMIC-SCALE MECHANISMS FOR UNSTABLE GROWTH.

Tabassom Tadayyon-Eslami, Doctor of Philosophy, 2006

Directed By: Professor Raymond J. Phaneuf, Department of Materials Science and Engineering

In this thesis we present an extensive investigation of instability in molecular beam epitaxial growth of GaAs(001) over a range of pattern periods, cell sizes, growth temperature and As2 flux. We find very good agreement with predictions of the continuum models of Sun, Guo and Grant [Phys. Rev. A 40, 6763(1989)] for the growth above ~540ºC and Lai and Das Sarma [Phys. Rev. Lett. 66, 2348 (1991)] for the growth below this temperature. Changing the growth temperature to lower than 540 ºC leads to the formation of ring-like protrusions in the [110] direction around pits patterned on the initial substrate, which are absent for growth at higher temperature. This change in growth mode occurs in the temperature range within in which both pre-roughening transition and surface reconstruction transition (β2(2x4) to c(4x4)) also occur.

We rule out the possibility of preroughening and the change in surface reconstruction as the reason for this growth mode change, based on the As2 flux dependence of the growth mode transition temperature.

Based on our atomic force microcopy characterization of the surface morphology during early the stage of growth, we propose a physically based model for the growth, which involves a competition between decreased adatom collection efficiency during growth on small terraces and a small anisotropic multiple step Ehrlich-Schwoebel barrier at the pit edge. This provides a physical basis for the nonlinear term in the continuum models proposed by Sun et. al., and Lai and Das Sarma, whose predictions qualitatively describe our experimental observations.

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