A possible mechanism for the recrystallization of InSb film on mica substrates

Abstract

The recrystallization of InSb films while growing through the melting–solidification process was investigated in detail. A great fluctuation of the film temperature was seen in some cases of the growing film, especially in the early stage of the evaporation process. This fluctuation of the film temperature gives rise to the melting–solidification process. In this work, two distinct types of temperature fluctuations were observed. It was found that the shape of the temperature fluctuation curves can be reasonably explained by the variation of deposition rate in such a way that a higher deposition rate at the early stage of evaporation yields higher temperature fluctuations. The deposition rate was also found to depend on the preheating time of source, hence the optimum deposition rate was easily obtained by varying this time. The optimum substrate temperature and preheating time for high quality InSb films were 260 °C and 180 s, respectively. The present method greatly improves the reproducibility of preparing high quality InSb thin film.