Relationship between dislocations and misfit strain relaxation in InGaAs/GaAs heterostructures

Large lattice mismatched heterostructures In0.78Ga0.22As/GaAs were grown with a low-temperature (LT) InGaAs buffer. Misfit dislocation arrays were observed at the LT-buffer/GaAs interfaces. Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) was used to investigate the microstructures of the heterointerfaces. The relationship between misfit dislocations and strain relaxation at the interface was analysed. It was found that strain redistribution gives rise to the discrepancy of interfacial structure and misfit strain relaxation for different samples. The experimental results are in favor of the conclusion and confirm the analysis we proposed.