9.3 Growth Monitoring Using RHEED - Growth of GaN on a-Plane Sapphire

Figure 23 shows the GaN RHEED pattern on a-plane sapphire, which assumes a c-plane orientation. It was noticed that AlN does not grow well on a-plane sapphire, becoming polycrystalline. Therefore only a few monolayers of AlN were deposited before GaN growth. The procedure followed was similar to GaN growth on c-plane sapphire as described in the preceding section. As can be seen, the RHEED pattern was comparable in quality to c-plane grown GaN, even though the AlN buffer layer did not grow well. More studies are needed to confirm this preliminary result.

Figure 23: 112(bar)0 and 11(bar)00 RHEED pattern of GaN on a-plane sapphire. Note that the closely regularly spaced streaks were due to a faulty CCD-camera.


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