Growth mechanisms and band bending in Cu and Pt on Ge(001) investigated by LEED and photoelectron spectroscopy

Abstract We investigate band bending effects occurring at the interface between atomically clean Ge(001) and molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) deposited copper and platinum. Low energy electron diffraction (LEED) confirmed the crystallinity of the surface, evidenced the formation of (2 × 1) and (1 × 2) reconstructions, and revealed that it is strongly affected with metal deposition. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) data let us assume a Stranski–Krastanov growth mechanism and confirmed that the observed band bending is associated to an ohmic contact in both cases. For the platinum contact, the high values of the apparent inelastic mean free path (IMFP) derived from the evolution of the XPS intensities indicate a prevalence of mixture of Pt with Ge nearby the interface. Pt deposited on Ge(001) does not behave like a Schottky contact, as one may have expected due to the higher work function of platinum. The observed effect is similar to the case where interfacial Pt had a lower work function by 2.25/1.96 eV than that of metallic Pt. We propose a model to explain this fact by the effective mass variation or to the conduction band broadening due to the strong intermixing of platinum with germanium under the surface.