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High Electron Mobility in Ga (In) Nas Films Grown by Molecular Beam Epitaxy
High Electron Mobility in Ga (In) Nas Films Grown by Molecular Beam Epitaxy
High Electron Mobility in Ga (In) Nas Films Grown by Molecular Beam Epitaxy
1
Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology (RCAST), The University of Tokyo, 4-6-1 Komaba,
Meguro-ku, Tokyo 153-8904, Japan
2
Toyota Technological Institute, 2-12-1 Hisakata, Tempaku-ku, Nagoya 468-8511, Aichi, Japan
(Received 4 October 2012; accepted 12 November 2012; published online 28 November 2012)
We report the highest mobility values above 2000 cm2/Vs in Si doped GaNAs film grown by
molecular beam epitaxy. To understand the feature of the origin which limits the electron mobility
in GaNAs, temperature dependences of mobility were measured for high mobility GaNAs and
referential low mobility GaInNAs. Temperature dependent mobility for high mobility GaNAs is
similar to the GaAs case, while that for low mobility GaInNAs shows large decrease in lower
temperature region. The electron mobility of high quality GaNAs can be explained by intrinsic
limiting factor of random alloy scattering and extrinsic factor of ionized impurity scattering.
C 2012 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4768949]
V
Since the proposal of the GaInNAs as a material for
high-efficiency multi-junction tandem solar cells1,2 and
GaAs-based long-wavelength optoelectronic devices,3,4
dilute nitride semiconductor alloy systems have received
much interest for their fundamental research. Both the properties of large bandgap reduction and decrease of lattice constant with incorporation of a small amount of nitrogen into
GaAs open their potential application for infrared devices
grown on GaAs substrate. However, both the optical and
electrical characteristics are generally degraded even if only
a few atomic percent of nitrogen are added to (In)GaAs, typically accompanied with compositional fluctuation.5 Therefore, usually one need to accurately control and optimize the
growth parameters such as the growth temperature,6 growth
rate, as well as the As/III flux ratio.7
Since the minority carrier properties of GaInNAs are inferior to the conventional III-V semiconductor materials,8,9
carrier collection in a GaInNAs sub-cell is generally insufficient for application to GaInP/GaAs/GaInNAs/Ge quadruple
junction solar cell. One tentative solution is to employ an
n-i-p structure with undoped i-GaInNAs absorber layer
which needs to possess very low carrier concentration. This
structure enables to increase photocurrent from GaInNAs
layer by field-aided carrier collection.9,10 For an effective solution, minority carrier diffusion length and hence both the
carrier mobility and the carrier life time need to be
improved. In this work, we report the highest mobility values
in Si-doped GaNAs films compared to those reported to
date.8,1115 We present the material properties of these films.
The 1.0 lm thick-Si doped GaNxAs films (x 0.009 and
0.013) were grown on semi-insulating GaAs (001) substrates
by radio frequency-molecular beam epitaxy (RF-MBE). The
GaNAs layers were grown under As2 flux of 2 105 Torr at
the growth temperature of 520 C and the growth rate of
1.0 lm/h. The amount of Si donor was set to 5 1017 cm3. As
for the N plasma condition, the N2 flux of 0.61 105 Torr
a)
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(2)
(3)
and
lAL
( p
)1
m 2 dEC 2 3
3m kB T
p
a0 x
;
e
dx
2ph2
(4)
where m* is the effective mass, kB is the Boltzmanns constant, e is the electronic charge, h is the Plancks constant,
EC is the conduction band energy, x is the N composition,
and a0 is the lattice constant. As for the dEC/dx term, we
adopt 10.2 eV,17 while m*/m0 0.088 for the effective
mass of electrons in Ga(In)NAs was deduced from Eq. (4)
and fitting the mobility result of GaN0.013As sample. This
effective mass value is the lowest possible mass for the best
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Miyashita et al.
FIG. 4. Mobility fitting curves for (a) high mobility GaNxAs (x 0.009 and
0.013) and (b) low mobility GaIn0.054N0.016As films.
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