Surface evolution during gallium arsenide homoepitaxy with molecular beam epitaxy

• Main Author: Whitwick, Michael Brian
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2010
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/17455

GaAs grown with MBE is the basis for many useful optoelectric devices. Measurements are presented of the smoothing of patterned and randomly roughened GaAs surfaces during homoepitaxy over a large range of Ga flux, substrate temperatures, arsenic fluxes, and Bi surfactant. The bulk of these measurements were taken by in-situ elastic light scattering or ex-situ AFM. These measurements provide experimental support for a non-linear continuum growth model that has been derived analytically from basic atomic level phenomena that occur in epitaxial film growth. During epitaxial growth the smoothing is observed to change in nature as the surface amplitude decreases. One of the regimes of smoothing is associated with the linear smoothing coefficients from the physically based non-linear continuum growth equation. The temperature and growth rate dependence of the smoothing coefficients are presented and found to be in good agreement with predictions from the continuum growth model. A key parameter in the continuum growth equation, the density of atomic steps, is measured independently using AFM. The step density, which agrees with theoretical predictions, is used to compute smoothing coefficients and is shown to be in agreement with the light scattering measurements. Complex shapes are observed for epitaxial growth on patterned GaAs substrates. Two characteristic surface morphologies were observed. The first is characterized by downward V-shaped cusps and rounded mounds caused by non-linear smoothing. The second morphology is similar, however the symmetry of the surface structure was inverted. This surface morphology has not been previously observed in GaAs. Step edge attachment was found to be the driving mechanism that produced both of these morphologies. Bismuth is observed to act as a surfactant in GaAs homoepitaxy. While Bi assisted growth is found to decrease the overall surface roughness, it is also found to alter the characteristics of the surface morphology. Notably, roughness at low spatial frequency was increased with the addition of Bi, while at high spatial frequency roughness was decreased. Significant changes to the shape evolution of patterned substrate are also observed when Bi is added to GaAs epitaxial growth. === Science, Faculty of === Physics and Astronomy, Department of === Graduate