Kinetic origin of island intermixing during the growth of Ge on Si (001) - Katsaros, Georgios; Costantini, Giovanni; Stoffel, Mathieu; Esteban, Rubén; Bittner, Alexander; Rastelli, Armando; Denker, Ulrich; Schmidt, Oliver; Kern, Klaus (Physical Review B - Condensed Matter and Materials Physics, 2005)
The effects of substrate temperature, growth rate, and postgrowth annealing on the composition of Ge islands grown on Si(001) were investigated with a combination of selective wet chemical etching and atomic force microscopy. A simple kinetic model comprising only surface diffusion processes can explain all the experimentally observed compositional profiles for pyramid and dome islands grown in the 560-620°C range. From this model three-dimensional compositional maps were extracted. By performing annealing experiments a change in the composition of the domes was observed. This could be explained as the result of the islands' movement induced by alloying-driven energy minimization. Also in this case kinetically hindered bulk diffusion processes are not needed to explain the experimental observations.
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