SiNx-induced intermixing in AlInGaAs/InP quantum well through interdiffusion of group III atoms
Lee, Ko-Hsin; Thomas, Kevin K.; Gocalińska, Agnieszka M.; Manganaro, Marina; Pelucchi, Emanuele; Peters, Frank H.; Corbett, Brian M.
Date:
2012
Copyright:
© 2012, American Institute of Physics. This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and AIP Publishing. The following article appeared in Lee, K.-H., Thomas, K., Gocalinska, A., Manganaro, M., Pelucchi, E., Peters, F. H. and Corbett, B. (2012) 'SiNx-induced intermixing in AlInGaAs/InP quantum well through interdiffusion of group III atoms', Journal of Applied Physics, 112(9), 093109 (4pp). doi: 10.1063/1.4764856 and may be found at http://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.4764856
Citation:
Lee, K.-H., Thomas, K., Gocalinska, A., Manganaro, M., Pelucchi, E., Peters, F. H. and Corbett, B. (2012) 'SiNx-induced intermixing in AlInGaAs/InP quantum well through interdiffusion of group III atoms', Journal of Applied Physics, 112(9), 093109 (4pp). doi: 10.1063/1.4764856
Abstract:
We analyze the composition profiles within intermixed and non-intermixed AlInGaAs-based multiple quantum wells structures by secondary ion mass spectrometry and observe that the band gap blue shift is mainly attributed to the interdiffusion of In and Ga atoms between the quantum wells and the barriers. Based on these results, several AlInGaAs-based single quantum well (SQW) structures with various compressive strain (CS) levels were grown and their photoluminescence spectra were investigated after the intermixing process involving the encapsulation of thin SiNx dielectric films on the surface followed by rapid thermal annealing. In addition to the annealing temperature, we report that the band gap shift can be also enhanced by increasing the CS level in the SQW. For instance, at an annealing temperature of 850 degrees C, the photoluminescence blue shift is found to reach more than 110 nm for the sample with 1.2%-CS SQW, but only 35 nm with 0.4%-CS SQW. We expect that this relatively larger atomic compositional gradient of In (and Ga) between the compressively strained quantum well and the barrier can facilitate the atomic interdiffusion and it thus leads to the larger band gap shift. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4764856]
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