We have studied the effect of rapid thermal annealing (RTA) on GaInNAs/GaAs quantum wells (QWs) grown by molecular-beam epitaxy using a dc plasma as the N source. It was found that RTA at low temperature (LT, 650 °C) and high temperature (HT, 900 °C) could both improve the QW quality significantly. To clarify the mechanism of quality improvement by RTA, a magnetic field perpendicular to the path of the N plasma flux was applied during the growth of the GaInNAs layers for the sake of comparison. It was found that LT-RTA mainly removed dislocations at interfaces related to the ion bombardment, whereas, HT-RTA further removed dislocations originating from the growth. LT-RTA caused only a slight blueshift of photoluminescence peak wavelength, probably due to defect-assisted interdiffusion of In–Ga at the QW interfaces. The blueshift caused by HT-RTA, on the other hand, was much larger. It is suggested that this is due to the fast defect-assisted diffusion of N–As at the QW interfaces. As defects are removed by annealing, the diffusion of In–Ga at interfaces would be predominant.
The effect of rapid thermal annealing (RTA) on the optical properties of GaNxAs1−x/GaAs strained single quantum well (SQW) was studied by low-temperature photoluminescence (PL). The GaNxAs1−x/GaAs SQW structures were prepared by dc active nitrogen plasma assisted molecular beam epitaxy. PL measurements on a series of samples with different well widths and nitrogen compositions were used to evaluate the effects of RTA. The annealing temperature and time were varied from 650 to 850 °C and 30 s to 15 min, respectively. Remarkable improvements of the optical properties of the samples were observed after RTA under optimum conditions. The interdiffusion constants have been calculated by taking into account error function diffusion and solving the Schrodinger equation. The estimated interdiffusion constants D are 10−17–10−16 cm2/s for the earlier annealing conditions. Activation energies of 6–7 eV are obtained by fitting the temperature dependence of the interdiffusion constants.
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