Highly Mismatched, Dislocation-Free SiGe/Si Heterostructures

Defect-free mismatched heterostructures on Si substrates are produced by an innovative strategy. The strain relaxation is engineered to occur elastically rather than plastically by combining suitable substrate patterning and vertical crystal growth with compositional grading. Its validity is proven both experimentally and theoretically for the pivotal case of SiGe/Si(001).

Reconstruction of crystal shapes by X-ray nanodiffraction from three-dimensional superlattices

Quantitative nondestructive imaging of structural properties of semiconductor layer stacks at the nanoscale is essential for tailoring the device characteristics of many low-dimensional quantum structures, such as ultrafast transistors, solid state lasers and detectors. Here it is shown that scanning nanodiffraction of synchrotron X-ray radiation can unravel the three-dimensional structure of epitaxial crystals containing a periodic superlattice underneath their faceted surface. By mapping reciprocal space in all three dimensions, the superlattice period is determined across the various crystal facets and the very high crystalline quality of the structures is demonstrated. It is shown that the presence of the superlattice allows the reconstruction of the crystal shape without the need of any structural model.

Perfect crystals grown from imperfect interfaces

The fabrication of advanced devices increasingly requires materials with different properties to be combined in the form of monolithic heterostructures. In practice this means growing epitaxial semiconductor layers on substrates often greatly differing in lattice parameters and thermal expansion coefficients. With increasing layer thickness the relaxation of misfit and thermal strains may cause dislocations, substrate bowing and even layer cracking. Minimizing these drawbacks is therefore essential for heterostructures based on thick layers to be of any use for device fabrication. Here we prove by scanning X-ray nanodiffraction that mismatched Ge crystals epitaxially grown on deeply patterned Si substrates evolve into perfect structures away from the heavily dislocated interface. We show that relaxing thermal and misfit strains result just in lattice bending and tiny crystal tilts. We may thus expect a new concept in which continuous layers are replaced by quasi-continuous crystal arrays to lead to dramatically improved physical properties.