Direct observation of threading dislocations in GaN by high-resolution Z- contrast imaging

摘要

Wide gap nitride semiconductors have attracted significant attention recently due to their promising performance as short-wavelength light emitting diodes (LEDs) and blue lasers. One interesting issue concerning GaN is that the material is relatively insensitive to the presence of a density of dislocations which is six orders of magnitude higher than that for III-V arsenide and phosphide based LEDs. Although it is well known that these dislocations originate at the film-substrate interface during film growth, thread through the whole epilayer with line direction along (and)amp;lt;0001(and)amp;gt; and are perfect dislocations with Burgers vectors of a, c, or c+a, the reason why they have such a small effect on the properties of GaN is unclear. To develop a fundamental understanding of the properties of these dislocations, the core structures are studied here by high resolution Z-contrast imaging in a 300kV VG HB603 scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM) with a resolution of 0.13 nm. As the Z-contrast image is a convolution between the probe intensity profile and the specimen object function, it is possible to obtain more detailed information on the specimen object function, i.e. the structure, through maximum entropy analysis (the maximum entropy technique produces the 'most likely' object function which is consistent with the image).