78 research outputs found
Effect of strain on surface diffusion in semiconductor heteroepitaxy
We present a first-principles analysis of the strain renormalization of the
cation diffusivity on the GaAs(001) surface. For the example of
In/GaAs(001)-c(4x4) it is shown that the binding of In is increased when the
substrate lattice is expanded. The diffusion barrier \Delta E(e) has a
non-monotonic strain dependence with a maximum at compressive strain values (e
0) studied.
We discuss the consequences of spatial variations of both the binding energy
and the diffusion barrier of an adatom caused by the strain field around a
heteroepitaxial island. For a simplified geometry, we evaluate the speed of
growth of two coherently strained islands on the GaAs(001) surface and identify
a growth regime where island sizes tend to equalize during growth due to the
strain dependence of surface diffusion.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, LaTeX2e, to appear in Phys. Rev. B (2001). Other
related publications can be found at
http://www.rz-berlin.mpg.de/th/paper.htm
First-principles calculation of the effect of strain on the diffusion of Ge adatoms on Si and Ge (001) surfaces
First-principles calculations are used to calculate the strain dependencies
of the binding and diffusion-activation energies for Ge adatoms on both Si(001)
and Ge(001) surfaces. Our calculations reveal that the binding and activation
energies on a strained Ge(001) surface increase and decrease, respectively, by
0.21 eV and 0.12 eV per percent compressive strain. For a growth temperature of
600 degrees C, these strain-dependencies give rise to a 16-fold increase in
adatom density and a 5-fold decrease in adatom diffusivity in the region of
compressive strain surrounding a Ge island with a characteristic size of 10 nm.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure
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