A universal description of III-V/Si epitaxial growth processes

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive experimental and theoretical analysis of III-V/Si epitaxial growth, revealing atomically-resolved growth modes, the dominance of surface/interface effects, and proposing a unified growth model.

Contribution

It introduces a universal description of III-V/Si epitaxial growth processes, including insights into early-stage island formation and antiphase boundary development.

Findings

Mono-domain 3D islands form at early growth stages regardless of misfit.

Complete wetting of III-V/Si systems is generally not achieved.

Surface/interface effects dominate over strain relief in free energy considerations.

Abstract

Here, we experimentally and theoretically clarify III-V/Si crystal growth processes. Atomically-resolved microscopy shows that mono-domain 3D islands are observed at the early stages of AlSb, AlN and GaP epitaxy on Si, independently of misfit. It is also shown that complete III-V/Si wetting cannot be achieved in most III-V/Si systems. Surface/interface contributions to the free energy variations are found to be prominent over strain relief processes. We finally propose a general and unified description of III-V/Si growth processes, including the description of antiphase boundaries formation.