No Arabic abstract
Top-down fabricated GaN nanowires, 250 nm in diameter and with various heights, have been used to experimentally determine the evolution of strain along the vertical direction of 1-dimensional objects. X-ray diffraction and photoluminescence techniques have been used to obtain the strain profile inside the nanowires from their base to their top facet for both initial compressive and tensile strains. The relaxation behaviors derived from optical and structural characterizations perfectly match the numerical results of calculations based on a continuous media approach. By monitoring the elastic relaxation enabled by the lateral free-surfaces, the height from which the nanowires can be considered strain-free has been estimated. Based on this result, NWs sufficiently high to be strain-free have been coalesced to form a continuous GaN layer. X-ray diffraction, photoluminescence and cathodoluminescence clearly show that despite the initial strain-free nanowires template, the final GaN layer is strained.
The coalescence in dense arrays of spontaneously formed GaN nanowires proceeds by bundling: adjacent nanowires bend and merge at their top, thus reducing their surface energy at the expense of the elastic energy of bending. We give a theoretical description of the energetics of this bundling process. The bending energy is shown to be substantially reduced by the creation of dislocations at the coalescence joints. A comparison of experimental and calculated x-ray diffraction profiles from ensembles of bundled nanowires demonstrates that a large part of the bending energy is indeed relaxed by plastic deformation. The residual bending manifests itself by extended tails of the diffraction profiles.
We investigate the strain state of ensembles of thin and nearly coalescence-free self-assembled GaN nanowires prepared by plasma-assisted molecular beam epitaxy on Ti/Al$_{2}$O$_{3}(0001)$ substrates. The shifts of Bragg peaks in high-resolution X-ray diffraction profiles reveal the presence of a homogeneous tensile strain in the out-of-plane direction. This strain is inversely proportional to the average nanowire radius and results from the surface stress acting on the nanowire sidewalls. The superposition of strain from nanowires with different radii in the same ensemble results in a broadening of the Bragg peaks that mimics an inhomogeneous strain on a macroscopic scale. The nanowire ensembles show a small blueshift of the bound-exciton transitions in photoluminescence spectra, reflecting the existence of a compensating in-plane compressive strain, as further supported by grazing incidence x-ray diffraction measurements carried out at a synchrotron. By combining X-ray diffraction and photoluminescence spectroscopy, the surface stress components $f_{x}$ and $f_{z}$ of the air-exposed GaN${1bar100}$ planes that constitute the nanowire sidewalls are determined experimentally to be 2.25 and $-0.7$~N/m, respectively.
We report a systematic study of p-type polarization induced doping in graded AlGaN nanowire light emitting diodes grown on silicon wafers by plasma-assisted molecular beam epitaxy. The composition gradient in the p-type base is varied in a set of samples from 0.7 %Al/nm to 4.95 %Al/nm corresponding to negative bound polarization charge densities of 2.2x10^18 cm^-3 to 1.6x10^19 cm^-3. Capacitance measurements and energy band modeling reveal that for gradients greater than or equal to 1.30 %Al/nm, the deep donor concentration is negligible and free hole concentrations roughly equal to the bound polarization charge density are achieved up to 1.6x10^19 cm^-3 at a gradient of 4.95 %Al/nm. Accurate grading lengths in the p- and n-side of the pn-junction are extracted from scanning transmission electron microscopy images and are used to support energy band calculation and capacitance modeling. These results demonstrate the robust nature of p-type polarization doping in nanowires and put an upper bound on the magnitude of deep donor compensation.
UV Raman scattering studies show longitudinal optical (LO) mode up to 4th order in wurtzite GaN nanowire system. Frohlich interaction of electron with the long range electrostatic field of ionic bonded GaN gives rise to enhancement in LO phonon modes. Good crystalline quality, as indicated by the crystallographic as well as luminescence studies, is thought to be responsible for this significant observation. Calculated size dependence, incorporating size corrected dielectric constants, of electron-phonon interaction energy agrees well with measured values and also predict stronger interaction energy than that of the bulk for diameter below ~3 nm.
We analyze the strain state of GaN nanowire ensembles by x-ray diffraction. The nanowires are grown by molecular beam epitaxy on a Si(111) substrate in a self-organized manner. On a macroscopic scale, the nanowires are found to be free of strain. However, coalescence of the nanowires results in micro-strain with a magnitude from +-0.015% to +-0.03%.This micro-strain contributes to the linewidth observed in low-temperature photoluminescence spectra.