Influence of atomic incident kinetic energy on crystalline quality of epitaxial GaN thin films: A molecular dynamics study

Abstract

The high-quality GaN thin films is of great significance for increasing the lifetime and performance of GaN devices. There are still few studies analyzing the effect of different incident energies on the crystalline quality of GaN thin films during epitaxy at the atomic scale. In this paper, the molecular dynamics (MD) method was adopted to simulate the epitaxial growth of GaN thin films under different particle incident energies. The crystal structure, surface morphology, dislocation evolution and internal stress of GaN films deposited under different growth energies were analyzed. The results showed that increasing the incident energy of the particles could help improve the epitaxial surface quality and make the atoms in the film more densely arranged. The tighter arrangement of atoms increased the nucleation height of dislocations in the film to a certain extent. In addition, as the thickness of the epitaxial films increased, the influence of the interfacial stress on the internal stress of the films gradually weakened.