1. Introduction
Zinc oxide (ZnO) has been important for the development of practical devices such as thin film transistors, magnetic semiconductors, transparent electrodes, and so on. ZnO has a large exciton energy of 60 meV, which raises the interesting possibility of utilizing excitonic effects at temperatures higher than 300 K (Thomas, 1960). Optically pumped UV stimulated emissions from ZnO layers have been demonstrated (Yu et al., 1997). Furthermore, MgxZn1-xO alloys are attracting a great deal of interest since they possess a higher band gap than ZnO (Sharma et al., 1999) and have been utilized for MgxZn1-xO/ZnO multiple and single-quantum wells (Chen et al., 2000, Makino et al., 2000). These structures can form low-dimensional systems and produce interesting quantum phenomena such as an increased excitonic binding energy (Coli & Bajaj, 20001) and two-dimensional (2-D) electron transport aspects that contribute to both basic science and practical applications. (Tsukazaki et al., 2007).
A variety of nanostructures in semiconductor materials have been made and investigated. The number of papers concerning nanostructures in ZnO is increasing yearly. Self-organized techniques provide advantages for nanoscale engineering and have yielded many impressive results. Therefore, surface nanostructures in Si and GaAs have been fabricated using various growth mechanisms. Stranski-Krastanov (S-K) growth on lattice mismatched systems induces three-dimensional (3-D) nanodots on the 2-D wetting layers. Lateral surface nanowires have been fabricated by a step-faceting mode on vicinal surfaces (Schönher et al., 2001). These surface nanostructures have been developed for zero-dimensional (0-D) quantum dots and one-dimensional (1-D) quantum wires, respectively (Wang & Voliotis, 2006). Low-dimensional properties are currently receiving attention as advantages for optoelectronics with ZnO.
In epitaxial growth, lattice mismatch between an epilayer and a substrate plays a crucial role in epitaxy. Growth studies concerning ZnO epitaxy have been carried out using
This chapter is organized as follows. In Section 2, we first give a description of polar and nonpolar growth on ZnO layers and outline a difference of surface nanowires between ZnO and GaAs systems. The surface nanowires on the
2. Difference in surface nanowires of ZnO and GaAs
2.1. Polar and nonpolar ZnO layer surfaces
ZnO has a hexagonal wurtzite structure (
kinetics and material characteristics. Therefore, it is important to understand the uppermost surface structure and morphology in a Zn-polar surface. Figure 1(b) shows a structural model of the Zn-polar (0001) surfaces of ZnO. All O atoms on the borders have three nearest neighbours, i.e., only one bond is broken. The Zn-polar surface is unstable due to the existence of a non-zero dipole moment perpendicular to the surface, which raises a fundamental question regarding stabilization mechanisms.
Figure 2 shows the surface morphologies of Zn-polar, O-polar and
On the other hand, the
2.2. High-index GaAs layer surfaces
Similar surface nanostructures have been formed by a step-faceting growth mode on vicinal GaAs (775)
3. Experimental
ZnO layers and Mg0.12Zn0.88O/ZnO quantum wells (QWs) were grown at 400 - 600oC on
estimated using an electron probe micro-analyzer (EPMA). The growth process was monitored using reflection high electron energy diffraction (RHEED).
Atomic force microscopy (AFM: Seiko SPI-3800) was used for observations of surface morphologies. Local structure analyses were conducted by means of high-resolution transmittance electron microscopy. Structural properties were characterized by high-resolution x-ray diffraction (HR-XRD: Philips X’pert) using a double-crystal monochromator. Micro-PL [(
3. Origin of surface nanowires
3.1. Growth evolution and structural quality
We describe the growth process and morphological evolution of the surface nanowires on the basis of RHEED and AFM investigations. The ZnO layers were grown at 550oC. At the very beginning of layer growth up to 8 nm in thickness, a 2D streak pattern appeared in place of sharp patterns of the ZnO substrates [Fig. 5(a) and 5(b)]. This is related to 2D nucleation at the initial growth stage, as evidenced by the smooth layer surface [Fig. 5(f)]. Continued growth of ZnO changed to a mixed pattern, which relates to the onset of the transition from 2D to 3D modes. This resulted from the appearance of a self-assembly of
anisotropic 3D islands [Fig. 5(c) and 5(g)]. Finally, the RHEED pattern showed 3D spots due to an island growth mode that originated from the formation of surface nanowires [Fig. 5(d) and 5(h)]. Surface nanowires with high density (105 cm-1) that formed on the ZnO layers were homogeneously elongated along the [0001] direction above 5 μm with a few branches.
Due to lattice strains at the heterointerface of a layer/substrate, S-K growth naturally induces 3D islands that are surrounded by high-index facets on 2D wetting layers. This has been observed in InGaAs/GaAs heteroepitaxy (Guha et al., 1990, Matsui et al., 2006). In an effort to examine the crystallinity in greater detail, plan-view and X-TEM observations were conducted to investigate the structural quality of the layer. Figure 6 (a) shows a low-
resolution X-TEM image with the [11-20] zone axis. Threading dislocations induced by lattice relaxation between the layer and substrate were not observed. The high-resolution X- TEM image in Fig. 6(b) reveals a lattice arrangement between a smoothly connected layer and substrate. A 3 x 3 nm2 space area selected from the layer region was utilized for a fast Fourier transform (FFT) analysis to examine local lattice parameters, and yielded a reciprocal space diffractogram (RSD) pattern [inset of Fig. 3(b)]. From the RSD pattern, the estimated strains (
3.2. Characteristics of surface nanowires
Figure 7(a) and 7(b) show low-and high-resolution X-TEM images with the [0001] zone axis, respectively. A cross section of the surface nanowires displayed a triangular configuration with a periodicity of 84 nm. A high-resolution X-TEM image, marked by a white circle, revealed that the side facets did not consist of high-index facets, but instead had a step-like structure with a height of 0.27 nm that corresponded to half a unit of the
The dependence of lateral periodicity of arrays on the thickness of the ZnO layers at a growth temperature (
The saturation of the lateral periodicity with the layer thickness suggested that the surface migration of Zn-related ablation species, such as ZnO and Zn, supplied from the ablation targets is limited by the terrace width of the side facets (Ohtomo, et al., 1998). This was in agreement with the notion that the increase in periodicity with increasing growth temperature was due to prolonged surface diffusion of ablated species at high temperatures. The importance of surface diffusion was demonstrated using MgxZn1-xO alloys. An inhomogeneity in nanowire length with increasing Mg content was found in surface nanowires on layer surfaces of MgxZn1-xO (10-10) layers, although the lateral periodicity remained unchanged [Figs. 8(c) and 8(d)]. This may have been due to differences in surface migration and sticking probabilities of Zn- and Mg-related species. Thus, surface diffusion plays an important role in determining the size of nanowires, depending on the growth conditions and surface compositions. Moreover, highly anisotropic morphologies must be related because surface diffusion is much faster along the [0001] direction.
3.3. Growth mechanism of surface nanowires
A multilayer morphology is determined not only by the transport of atoms within an atom layer (
Mound formation is often observed on various systems such as semiconductors, metals, and organic materials. A mound structure possesses a small flat plateau at the top and a side facet with constant step spacing, and is separated from other mounds by deep grooves. This structure has been observed on dislocation-free metal homoepitaxial surfaces such as Pt/Pt (111) and Ag/Ag (100) systems, and is often referred to as a wedding cake (Michely & Krug, 2004). Here, mound formation emerging under reduced interlayer transport is described using the coarsening
Anisotropic island growth on GaAs (001) based on the ESB effect is suppressed using vicinal GaAs (001) substrates with an off angle above a certain value (Johnson et al., 1994). AFM images of the ZnO layers on the vicinal substrates are shown in Fig. 11. With an increasing off angle, the cross-section profile of the AFM images gradually changed from symmetric to asymmetric shapes following the increase in lateral periodicity. The ZnO layer yielded a smooth surface with a roughness below 2 nm when the off angle of the substrate reached 15o. The off angle of 15o was close to that of the inclination of the surface nanowires. Figures 10 and 11 indicate that the surface nanowires originated from the ESB mechanism.
4. Band gap engineering and quantum wells (QWs)
4.1. MgxZn1-xO alloys
The discovery of tenability of a band gap energy based on ZnO has made the alloy system a promising material for use in the development of optoelectronic devices. Characterization of alloys such as (Mg,Zn)O or (Cd,Zn)O is important from the viewpoint of band gap engineering and the
4.2. MgZnO/ZnO superlattices
A micro (
on ZnO layers with surface nanowires at
5. Anisotropic optical properties of MQWs
5.1. Linear polarized emissions
ZnO has attracted great interest for new fields of optical applications. Interesting characteristics of wurzite structure include the presence of polarization-induced electric fields along the c-axis. However, the optical quality of a quantum-well structure grown along the c-axis suffers from undesirable spontaneous and piezoelectric polarizations in well layers, which lower quantum efficiency. The use of nonpolar ZnO avoids this problem due to an equal number of cations and anions in the layer surface. Nonpolar ZnO surfaces have in-plane anisotropy of structural, optical, acoustic, and electric properties, which is useful for novel device applications. In this session, we discuss polarized PL of
Figure 14 shows splitting of the valence band (VB) in ZnO under the influence of crystal-field splitting and spin-orbit coupling. The VB of ZnO is composed of
For ZnO, the experiment gave
Figure 15(a) shows the
5.2. In-plane anisotropy of MQW emissions
The polarization PL character in
The emission peaks around 3.6 eV correspond to 7 nm-thick Mg0.12Zn0.88O barriers. At 300 K, an energy separation (Δ
6. In-pane anisotropy of conductivity on MQWs for quantum wires
Transport properties were determined using a double Hall bar configuration with the [0001] and [1-210] directions [Fig. 17(a) and 17(b)]. Figure 17 (b) shows the temperature-dependent Hall mobility parallel (
Figure 18 (a) shows the ratio of
On the other hand, parallel conductance along the nanowires involves a lower scattering probality than perpendicular transport due to a weak heterointerface modulation. However, the
Finally, the whole
6. Conclusion
We introduced a growth process for the anisotropic morphology that formed naturally on
In this chapter, we reported the formation of electrical channels with a 1-D conductance as in quantum wires using M-nonpolar MQWs on the lateral surface of a nanowires structrue. Semiconductor quantum wires have been the subject of extensive theoretical and experimental studies over the past two to three decades. These are motivated by various unique quantum effects predicted in 1-D electronic systems, such as strong Coulomb correlation, suppression of electron scattering and an increase of quantum confinement. Q uantum wires have many potential applications to optoelectronic devices, such as high-mobility field-effect transistors. These surface nanowire structures contribute additional degrees of freedom for future studies of electron transport in field-effect transistors and magnetoelectric devices.
Acknowledgments
This work was supported in part by a Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (No. 18760231) from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and a research grant from the Iketani Science and Technology Foundation (No. 081085-A)
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