Epitaxial growth of ZnSiN 2 single-crystalline films on sapphire substrates

Abstract

A new family of wide band gap nitride semiconductors expressed as II–IV-N 2 have recently attracted attention due to their expected properties such as optical non-linearity. In addition, among these compounds, ZnGeN 2 and ZnSiN 2 have lattice parameters close to GaN and SiC respectively. Up to now, there is very little work reported on this class of materials and no systematic thin film growth study has been reported to date. In this paper we present the first study on the growth of ZnSiN 2 on c-sapphire and (100) silicon substrates using low pressure MOVPE technique. Triethylamine:dimethylzinc adduct, silane diluted in H 2 and ammonia were used as source materials. Single crystalline epitaxial ZnSiN 2 layers were obtained on nitridated c-sapphire substrates in the temperature range 873–973 K by using an adapted II/IV molar ratio ranging from 1.2 to 12. Assuming an orthorhombic unit cell, the lattice parameters calculated from the X-ray diffraction data are a = 0.534 nm, b = 0.617 nm and c = 0.504 nm.