Stress‐engineered orderings of self‐assembled III–V semiconductor nanostructures

Abstract

We report lateral orderings of self-assembled GaAs and InGaAs nanostructures by the stress field of a periodic dislocation network (DN) shallowly buried and parallel to the surface. This DN is a grain boundary (GB) that forms, between a thin GaAs layer and a GaAs substrate joined together by wafer bonding, in order to accommodate a tilt and a twist between these two crystals; both these misorientations are imposed in a controlled manner. This GB is composed of a one-dimensional network of mixed dislocations and of a one dimensional network of screw dislocations. The mixed DN accommodates the tilt and a part of the twist, while the screw DN accommodates the remaining twist. The ordered nanostructures we report result from a growth by metalorganic vapor phase epitaxy of a GaAs/InAs/GaAs sequence on the thin bonded layer. Using transmission electron microscope and atomic force microscope images, we prove that these nanostructures have same dimensions and orientations as the cells of the underlying DN and are thus correlated to the latter. (© 2005 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)