Demonstration of epitaxial growth of strain-relaxed GaN films on graphene/SiC substrates for long wavelength light-emitting diodes

Ye Yu,Zhifeng Shi,Baolin Zhang,Fang Liu,Yuantao Zhang,Haotian Ma,Xiaomeng Li,Lidong Zhang,Xiufang Chen,Tao Wang,Xinqiang Wang,Yunfei Niu,Gaoqiang Deng,Jiaqi Yu,Yang Wang

doi:10.1038/s41377-021-00560-3

Abstract

Strain modulation is crucial for heteroepitaxy such as GaN on foreign substrates. Here, the epitaxy of strain-relaxed GaN films on graphene/SiC substrates by metal-organic chemical vapor deposition is demonstrated. Graphene was directly prepared on SiC substrates by thermal decomposition. Its pre-treatment with nitrogen-plasma can introduce C–N dangling bonds, which provides nucleation sites for subsequent epitaxial growth. The scanning transmission electron microscopy measurements confirm that part of graphene surface was etched by nitrogen-plasma. We study the growth behavior on different areas of graphene surface after pre-treatment, and propose a growth model to explain the epitaxial growth mechanism of GaN films on graphene. Significantly, graphene is found to be effective to reduce the biaxial stress in GaN films and the strain relaxation improves indium-atom incorporation in InGaN/GaN multiple quantum wells (MQWs) active region, which results in the obvious red-shift of light-emitting wavelength of InGaN/GaN MQWs. This work opens up a new way for the fabrication of GaN-based long wavelength light-emitting diodes.

Highlights

Due to direct wide bandgap and high stability, group III-nitride semiconductors have been widely used in lightemitting diodes (LEDs), laser diodes and photodetectors[1,2,3]
Graphene was directly prepared on SiC substrates by thermal decomposition
The characteristic G peak (~1582 cm−1) and 2D peak (~2700 cm−1) of graphene can be seen in Raman spectra of five measured positions, which indicates that the prepared graphene on SiC substrate by thermal decomposition has good uniformity[19,20]

Summary

Introduction

Due to direct wide bandgap and high stability, group III-nitride semiconductors have been widely used in lightemitting diodes (LEDs), laser diodes and photodetectors[1,2,3]. The epitaxial growth of GaN on graphene forms weak covalent bonds at the interface between graphene and epitaxial layer, which makes the lattice at the interface produce no large strain as the traditional heteroepitaxy, and the stress in films greatly reduced[14]. This provides a new path for heteroepitaxial growth of GaN films. The lack of dangling bonds on graphene suppresses the GaN nucleation, limiting the growth of continuous and smooth GaN films on graphene[17] To solve this problem, some researches have achieved the epitaxial growth of nitrides on graphene by introducing interfacial buffers or defects on graphene

Methods

Results

Conclusion