TEM study of nm-scale semiconductor islands in lattice-mismatched systems

摘要

Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) has been applied to study the vertically correlated growth of semiconductor island sheets. Island size and shape, lateral and vertical ordering in both (in, Ga)As/GaAs and Ge/Si systems wer investigated experimentally. Strong one-to-one correlation between the island sheets was found at the first stage of multilayered structure growth. The lateral size and volume of islands porogressively increased with each deposition cycle. Being more significant for low mismatched systems these changes are due to the locally reeduced misfit above buried islands and depend on both monolayer (ML) coverage in a sheet and spacer thickness.