Nucleationmechanismsandtheeliminationofmisfit.PDFVIP

Nucleation mechanisms and the elimination of misfit dislocations at mismatched interfaces by reduction in growth area E. A. Fitzgerald,a) G. P. Watson, R. E. Preano, and D. G. Ast Department ofMaterials Science and Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853 P. D. Kirchner, G. D. Pettit, and J. M. Woodall IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598 (Received 15 August 1988; accepted for publication 18 November 1988) To investigate the effect of growth area on interface dislocation density in strained-layer epitaxy, we have fabricated 2-.um-high mesas of varying lateral dimensions and geometry in 4 2 2 (001) GaAs substrates with dislocation densities of 1.5 X 10\ 10 , and 10 cm-- • 3500-, 7000-, and 8250-A-thick Ino (J5 Gao 95 As layers, corresponding to 5, to, and 11 times the experimental critical layer thickness as measured for large-area samples, were then deposited by molecular- beam epitaxy. For the 3500-A layers, the linear interface dislocation density, defined as the inverse of the average dislocation spacing, was reduced from greater than 5000 to less than 800 em - I for mesas as large as 100pm. A pronounced difference in the linear interface dislocation densities along the two interface (110) directions indicates that a dislocations nucleate about twice as much as /3 dislocations. For samples grown on the highest dislocation density substrates, the linear interface-dislocation density was found to vary linearly with mesa width and to extrapolate to a zero linear interface-dislocation density for a mesa width of zero. This behavior excludes dis