Critical thickness for strain relaxation of Ge1−xSnx (x ≤ 0.17) grown by molecular beam epitaxy on Ge(001)

We investigated the critical thickness (hc) for plastic relaxation of Ge1−xSnx grown by molecular beam epitaxy. Ge1−xSnx films with various Sn mole fraction x (x ≤ 0.17) and different thicknesses were grown on Ge(001). The strain relaxation of Ge1−xSnx films and the hc were investigated by high-reso...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Applied physics letters 2015-06, Vol.106 (23)
Main Authors: Wang, Wei, Zhou, Qian, Yuan, Dong, Tok, Eng Soon, Yee-Chia, Yeo
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Applied physics
Epitaxial growth
Germanium
Mathematical models
Molecular beam epitaxy
Strain relaxation
Tin
X-ray diffraction
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Summary:We investigated the critical thickness (hc) for plastic relaxation of Ge1−xSnx grown by molecular beam epitaxy. Ge1−xSnx films with various Sn mole fraction x (x ≤ 0.17) and different thicknesses were grown on Ge(001). The strain relaxation of Ge1−xSnx films and the hc were investigated by high-resolution x-ray diffraction and reciprocal space mapping. It demonstrates that the measured hc values of Ge1−xSnx layers are as much as an order of magnitude larger than that predicted by the Matthews and Blakeslee (M-B) model. The People and Bean (P-B) model was also used to predict the hc values in Ge1−xSnx/Ge system. The measured hc values for various Sn content follow the trend, but slightly larger than that predicted by the P-B model.
ISSN:0003-6951
1077-3118
DOI:10.1063/1.4922529