Structural and chemical characterization of nanostructured III – V compound semiconductors by analytical TEM

Abstract

Abstract The paper reports structural and microchemical investigations of low-dimensional semiconducting materials by combined imaging and spectroscopical techniques of transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The materials systems under investigation comprise graded (Al,Ga)As layers, (In,Ga)As quantum wires in V-grooved (001)InP, and (In,Ga)As quantum dots in GaAs. In order to elucidate structural peculiarities of these objects conventional and high-resolution TEM (CTEM/HRTEM) were performed, whereas information about the chemical composition and element distribution was obtained through electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS), energy-filtered TEM (EFTEM), and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDXS). Particularly, the application possibilities of EFTEM are here demonstrated for revealing the local element content at high lateral resolution in a semi-quantitative manner.