Comparison of Relaxation Process of Compressive and Tensile Strains in InGaAs Lattice-Mismatched Layers on InP Substrates

Abstract

This paper investigates the difference in crystal quality between strained-layer multiple quantum wells with compressive (+0.5%) and tensile strains (-0.5 %). For the compressive strain, the photoluminescence intensity decreased and the length of fringe bending increased from 250 Å to 500 Å when the number of periods increased from 5 to 15. The amount of fringe bending increased when the InP thickness decreased, especially when the strain was compressive. We also investigated the relaxation process in an InGaAs layer as a function of the layer thickness (from 25 nm to 2 µ m). For a compressive strain (+1.1%), misfit dislocations were observed near the interface between InGaAs and InP substrate. On the other hand, for a tensile strain (-1.1 %), we observed cracks instead of misfit dislocations. Moreover, the cracks were considered to increase the X-ray full width at half maximum of both the InGaAs lattice-mismatched layer and the InP substrate.