Growth of group III nitrides by chemical beam epitaxy

III-N materials have become important for use in applications requiring wide band gap semiconductors. The use of less strongly bonded precursors for growth of III-N binaries has been investigated and their effect on incorporation efficiency and impurity uptake has been determined, These experiments indicate that triethylgallium and dimethylethylamine alane are the preferred sources for deposition of GaN and AIN. While triethylindium was found to improve the incorporation efficiency relative to trimethylindium, both sources produced InN with high residual n-type conduction, Increasing growth temperature and decreasing nitrogen flux resulted in significant improvement in the crystallinity of GaN. However, reducing the microwave power did not, Optimizing the growth conditions improved structural quality which was quantified by high resolution X-ray diffraction. Full width at half maximum values of 430 and 410 arcsec were obtained for AIN and GaN, respectively, using growth rates of 0.3-0.5 mu m/h. Also, the effects of variations in growth parameters on surface morphology and below band edge absorption in GaN were investigated. In addition to novel Group III sources, alternatives to thermally cracked NH3 and nitrogen plasma were investigated. Tertiarybutylamine and triisobutylamine were found to be capable of growing AIN using dimethylethylamine alane but were less successful in growing GaN and InN due to the poor catalytic interaction of the amines at the growth surface.