Surface optical phonon modes in hexagonal shaped Al0.97Ga0.03N nanostructures

Abstract

Raman modes of plasma assisted molecular beam epitaxy grown, c-plane oriented and hexagonal shaped cylindrical Al0.97Ga0.03N nanostructures are reported. Apart from the group theoretically allowed optical phonons at zone center (wave vector, q = 0), two additional phonon modes around 763 and 846 cm−1 are observed in between the reported values of longitudinal optical (LO q=0) and transverse optical (TO q=0) phonon modes. The observed phonon mode frequencies are matched with the simulated dispersion curve for the surface optical (SO) phonon modes and subsequently assigned as SO(A 1) and SO(E 1) with A 1 and E 1 symmetries, respectively. A change in the dielectric constant of the surrounding medium using CCl4 is demonstrated to show a significant red shift of the additional modes with respect to those in air, and they show good agreement with the calculated SO phonon frequencies. The origin of SO phonon modes are attributed to the relaxation of Raman selection rules away from the Brillouin zone centre because of the presence of periodic surface modulations of sharp edges at the corners of well-faceted Al0.97Ga0.03N hexagonal crystallites in the sample. An appropriate quantification is also made in this regard to find out the Fourier component of the surface potential responsible for activating the SO mode.