Jia, H;
Jurczak, P;
YANG, J;
Tang, M;
Li, K;
Deng, H;
Dang, M;
... Liu, H; + view all
(2020)
Impact of ex-situ annealing on strain and composition of MBE grown GeSn.
Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics
10.1088/1361-6463/abae94.
(In press).
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Abstract
The application of GeSn is extended to semiconductor lasers thanks to its band engineering via Sn composition and strain manipulation. As one of the strain engineering methods, thermal annealing, however, is not yet being widely adopted by the majority due to the thermal instability it induces. The thermal stability of GeSn is highly sensitive to initial material conditions, consequently thorough investigations are still demanded with different purposes. A detailed investigation on the thermal annealing effects of thick GeSn layers with a nominal 8% Sn grown on Ge-buffered Si (001) substrate by Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE) is presented here. Atomic force microscopy (AFM), high-resolution x-ray diffraction (HRXRD) and Raman spectroscopy were used to trace the change of GeSn surface morphology and the strain relaxation after annealing. It is confirmed that the tetragonal compressive strain in GeSn, which is a proven detriment to the realisation of direct-bandgap material, can be relaxed by 90% while improving crystal quality, e.g. reduced surface roughness by appropriate annealing conditions. These findings reveal the potential of annealed GeSn to serve as a much thinner (750 nm), better lattice-matched to GeSn active layer and highly strain-relaxed platform to grow GeSn on compared to the thick Ge or the compositional-graded (Si)GeSn buffer layers, which are complicated and time-consuming in growth procedures and also securing an easier approach.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Impact of ex-situ annealing on strain and composition of MBE grown GeSn |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1088/1361-6463/abae94 |
| Publisher version: | http://dx.doi.org/110.1088/1361-6463/abae94 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | As the Version of Record of this article is going to be/has been published on a gold open access basis under a CC BY 3.0 licence, this Accepted Manuscript is available for reuse under a CC BY 3.0 licence immediately. Although reasonable endeavours have been taken to obtain all necessary permissions from third parties to include their copyrighted content within this article, their full citation and copyright line may not be present in this Accepted Manuscript version. Before using any content from this article, please refer to the Version of Record on IOPscience once published for full citation and copyright details, as permission may be required. All third party content is fully copyright protected, and is not published on a gold open access basis under a CC BY licence, unless that is specifically stated in the figure caption in the Version of Record. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Electronic and Electrical Eng |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10107958 |
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