Room-Temperature Growth of UV-Emitting Dendritic GaN Fractal Nanostructures Using Photochemical Vapor Deposition

Abstract

A dendritic gallium nitride (GaN) structure was grown at room temperature using photochemical vapor deposition with trimethylgallium and ammonia as the source materials. The sample was investigated by a scanning electron microscope and photoluminescence (PL). Its morphology was evaluated using fractal analysis. The surface morphology of the deposited film had dendritic nanostructures similar in morphology to the diffusion-limited aggregation. Dendritic GaN had a strong PL spectrum with a peak energy of 3.55 eV at 5 K, indicating the quantum size effect. Using the box-counting method, the fractal dimension of the dendritic GaN nanostructure was calculated to be approximately 1.7.

Deterministic fractals: Extracting additional information from small-angle scattering data

“…Modern experimental techniques in materials science for preparing hierarchically organized systems at nano and micro scales open up new possibilities in controlling their functions and properties. Considerable scientific and technological efforts have been directed to the development of such systems [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11]. The hierarchical structures, like fractals [12] or biological objects [13], manifest themselves in the electromagnetic [14], statistical [15], dynamical [16] or optical [17,18] properties, and therefore one of the basic challenges is to understand correlations between these properties and material's microstructure [19,20].…”