High-temperature growth of GaN nanowires by molecular beam epitaxy: toward the materials quality of bulk GaN

Abstract

In molecular beam epitaxy, the spontaneous formation of GaN nanowires on Si(111) substrates at elevated temperatures is limited by the long incubation time that precedes nanowire nucleation. In this work, we present three unconventional growth approaches to minimize the incubation time and thus facilitate significantly higher growth temperatures (up to 875${}^{\circ }$C). We achieve this by: (i) using III/V flux ratios larger than one to compensate for Ga desorption, (ii) introducing a two-step growth procedure, and (iii) using an AlN buffer layer to favor GaN nucleation. The GaN nanowire ensembles grown at so far unexplored substrate temperatures exhibit excitonic transitions with sub-meV linewidths and the low-temperature photoluminescence spectra are comparable to those of state-of-the-art free-standing GaN layers grown by hydride vapor phase epitaxy.

References in corpus (13)

• Adatom Diffusion at GaN (0001) and (000bar1) Surfaces
• Gallium adsorption on (0001) GaN surfaces
• A growth diagram for plasma-assisted molecular beam epitaxy of GaN nanocolumns on Si(111)
• Direct experimental determination of the spontaneous polarization of GaN
• Angular dependence of the magnetic susceptibility in the itinerant metamagnet Sr3Ru2O7
• Self-regulated radius of spontaneously formed GaN nanowires in molecular beam epitaxy
• In situ GaN decomposition analysis by quadrupole mass spectrometry and reflection high-energy electron diffraction
• In situ investigation of growth modes during plasma-assisted molecular beam epitaxy of (0001)GaN
• Monitoring the formation of nanowires by line-of-sight quadrupole mass spectrometry: a comprehensive description of the temporal evolution of GaN nanowire ensembles
• Stacking faults as quantum wells in nanowires: Density of states, oscillator strength and radiative efficiency
• Correlation between the structural and optical properties of spontaneously formed GaN nanowires: a quantitative evaluation of the impact of nanowire coalescence
• Sub-meV linewidth in GaN nanowire ensembles: absence of surface excitons due to the field-ionization of donors
• Compatibility of the selective area growth of GaN nanowires on AlN-buffered Si substrates with the operation of light emitting diodes

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Molecular beam epitaxy of single crystalline GaN nanowires on a flexible Ti foil
• A physical model for the reverse leakage current in (In,Ga)N/GaN light-emitting diodes based on nanowires
• Improved control over spontaneously formed GaN nanowires in molecular beam epitaxy using a two-step growth process
• Nature of excitons bound to inversion domain boundaries: Origin of the 3.45-eV luminescence lines in spontaneously formed GaN nanowires on Si(111)
• External control of GaN band bending using phosphonate self-assembled monolayers
• Growth kinetics and substrate stability during high-temperature molecular beam epitaxy of AlN nanowires
• Crystal-phase quantum dots in GaN quantum wires
• Comprehensive investigation on the correlation of growth, structural and optical properties of GaN nanowires grown on Si(111) substrates by plasma assisted molecular beam epitaxy technique
• Coalescence, crystallographic orientation and luminescence of ZnO nanowires grown on Si(001) by chemical vapour transport