Selective growth of strained (In)GaAs quantum dots on GaAs substrates employing diblock copolymer lithography nanopatterning

Abstract

Semiconductor laser diodes (LD) were demonstrated employing a strained (In)GaAs quantum dot (QD) active region grown by metalorganic vapor phase epitaxy (MOVPE) on nominally exact (100) GaAs substrates using selective area epitaxy (SAE). The SAE QD growth employed a SiNx nano-patterned mask defined by diblock copolymer (BCP) lithography. In-situ etching using carbon tetrabromide (CBr4), prior to the SAE of the QDs, was shown to be effective to remove the processing-related damage introduced during the nanopattern transfer process, resulting in a significant reduction in the threshold current density of the LD under the optimal in-situ etching condition. Furthermore, the modal optical gain parameter and the transparency current density were extracted by the conventional cavity length analysis (CLA) on LD devices where the QD was grown with the optimal in-situ etching condition.