Low-Temperature Growth of InGaAs Quantum Wells Using Migration-Enhanced Epitaxy

Abstract

The growth of InGaAs quantum wells (QWs) epitaxially on InP substrates is of great interest due to their wide application in optoelectronic devices. However, conventional molecular beam epitaxy requires substrate temperatures between 400 and 500 °C, which can lead to disorder scattering, dopant diffusion, and interface roughening, adversely affecting device performance. Lower growth temperatures enable the fabrication of high-speed optoelectronic devices by increasing arsenic antisite defects and reducing carrier lifetimes. This work investigates the low-temperature epitaxial growth of InAs/GaAs short-period superlattices as an ordered replacement for InGaAs quantum wells, using migration-enhanced epitaxy (MEE) with low growth temperatures down to 200–250 °C. The InAs/GaAs multi-quantum wells with InAlAs barriers using MEE grown at 230 °C show good single crystals with sharp interfaces, without mismatch dislocations found. The Raman results reveal that the MEE mode enables the growth of (InAs)4(GaAs)3/InAlAs QWs with excellent periodicity, effectively reducing alloy scattering. The room temperature (RT) photoluminescence (PL) measurement shows the strong PL responses with narrow peaks, revealing the good quality of the MEE-grown QWs. The RT electron mobility of the sample grown in low-temperature MEE mode is as high as 2100 cm2/V∗s. In addition, the photoexcited band-edge carrier lifetime was about 3.3 ps at RT. The high-quality superlattices obtained confirm MEE’s effectiveness for enabling advanced III-V device structures at reduced temperatures. This promises improved performance for applications in areas such as high-speed transistors, terahertz imaging, and optical communications.