Ellipsometric study of GaN/AlN/Si(111) heterostructures grown by molecular beam epitaxy

Abstract

GaN and related structures attracted a great interest in the recent years for electronic and optoelectronic applications due to their promising properties. GaN is grown popularly on foreign substrates like sapphire and SiC. However, silicon due to its favourable properties attended the great attention of material scientists and researchers to utilize as substrate for heteroepitaxy of GaN based structures and devices. Silicon substrates are low cost, available in large diameters and have well characterized thermal and electrical properties. In this study, GaN/AlN/Si(111) heterostructures were grown by molecular beam epitaxy. We performed x-ray diffraction spectroscopy and spectroscopic ellipsometry on these samples to study their structural and optical properties. XRD measurements performed on these samples revealed the presence of high quality GaN films as well as the presence of AlN buffer layer with the following miller indices: GaN (002), GaN (004), GaN (006) and GaN (110) along with Si peak of phase (111). The ellipsometric data obtained were used to characterize the GaN/Si samples as a function of film thickness. Refractive index, extinction coefficient and dielectric constant were calculated by the measured data.