Competition between strain-induced and temperature-controlled nucleation of InAs/GaAs quantum dots

Abstract

Atomic force microscopy and photoluminescence spectroscopy (PL) have been used to study asymmetric bilayer InAs quantum dot (QD) structures grown by molecular-beam epitaxy on GaAs(001) substrates. The two QD layers were separated by a GaAs spacer layer (SL) of varying thickness and were grown at different substrate temperatures. Grown independently, these two layers would exhibit a widely different QD number density, and this technique therefore enables us to assess the influence of the strain fields created by the dots in the first layer on the second-layer QD nucleation and characteristics. For very large SLs (>40 nm), total strain relief causes the QD nucleation to be controlled exclusively by the substrate temperature, which influences the migration of In adatoms. In this case, the optical and morphological properties of the second QD layer are identical to a structure with a single QD layer grown at the same temperature. In structures with a much smaller SL, strain effects dominate over the effect of temperature in controlling the nucleation of the QDs, thereby fixing the second-layer QD number density to that of the first (templating effect). There is also evidence that strain relaxation is present in the QDs of the second layer and that this is crucial for extending their emission wavelength. The optimum SL thickness is shown to be 11 nm, for which low-temperature PL emission peaks at 1.26 μm, with a full width at half-maximum of only 15 meV. Intermediate SL thicknesses exhibit broad QD size distributions, with strain effects only partly influencing the QD growth in the second layer.