Facile surface treatment of precursors before rapid melt growth of GaSb on silicon

Abstract The efficient monolithic III-V integration on silicon (Si) substrates can leverage the excellent optoelectronic properties of III-V semiconductors and the Si microfabrication technology for electronic, optoelectronics, integrated photonics devices. However, the origin of the interfacial and material defects during III-V monolithic integration on Si poses the challenge to achieve efficient optical emitters, detectors. In this study, we investigated different surface treatment schemes before rapid melt growth (RMG) of GaSb on Si substrate to attain defect control. The deposition of an Sb layer (10 nm) on GaSb precursors surfaces resulted in achieving better structural and optical properties of GaSb post RMG. We achieved a reduction of 2.48 atomic % of unintentional incorporation of Si into the GaSb via Sb treatment compared to that of untreated GaSb analysed using transmission electron microscopy and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy. Improved surface morphology with reduced root mean square roughness of 3.7 nm is obtained with Sb layer treatment compared to 5.6 nm for untreated GaSb precursor measured by atomic force microscopy. We obtained improved optical properties and low defect density with an in-situ Sb treatment scheme on GaSb precursor surface by µ-Photoluminescence and µ-Raman spectroscopy analysis.