Cathodoluminescence study of molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) grown MgZnSSe and BeMgZnSe alloy based heterostructures

Cathodoluminescence (CL) is shown to be a very effective and fast technique for the study of defects and their spatial distributions in ZnSe-based epilayers and heterostructures, including laser diodes grown by MBE on GaAs. A relatively low electron beam primary energy (<20 keV) is found to be most preferable for the correct stacking fault (SF) observation. CL of undoped heterostructures with a CdSe fractional monolayer active region provides useful information on the spatial distribution of large relaxed CdSe-based islands containing nonradiative recombination centers.