The effect of low temperature GaAs nucleation on the growth of GaN on Silicon (001) during MOVPE process

High quality cubic GaN was grown on Silicon (001) by metalorganic vapor phase epitaxy (MOVPE) using a GaAs nucleation layer grown at low temperature. The influence of various nucleation conditions on the GaN epilayers' quality was investigated. We found that the GaAs nucleation layer grown by atomic layer epitaxy (ALE) could improve the quality of GaN films by depressing the formation of mixed phase. Photoluminescence (PL) and X-ray diffraction were used to characterize the properties of GaN epilayers. High quality GaN epilayers with PL full width at half maximum (FWHM) of 130meV at room temperature and X-ray FWHM of 70 arc-min were obtained by using 10-20nm GaAs nucleation layer grown by ALE.

Behavior of Pentacene Initial Nucleation on Various Dielectrics and Its Effect on Carrier Transport in Organic Field-Effect Transistor

The influence of dielectric surface energy on the initial nucleation and the growth of pentacene films as well as the electrical properties of the pentacene-based field-effect transistors are investigated. We have examined a range of organic and inorganic dielectrics with different surface energies, such as polycarbonate/SiO2, polystyrene/SiO2, and PMMA/SiO2 bi-layered dielectrics and also the bare SiO2 dielectric. Atomic force microscopy measurements of sub-monolayer and thick pentacene films indicated that the growth of pentacene film was in Stranski-Kranstanow growth mode on all the dielectrics. However, the initial nucleation density and the size of the first-layered pentacene islands deposited on different dielectrics are drastically influenced by the dielectric surface energy. With the increasing of the surface energy, the nucleation density increased and thus the average size of pentacene islands for the first mono-layer deposition decreased. The performance of fabricated pentacene-based thin film transistors was found to be highly related to nucleation density and the island size of deposited Pentacene film, and it had no relationship to the final particle size of the thick pentacene film. The field effect mobility of the thin film transistor could be achieved as high as 1.38 cm(2)/Vs with on/off ratio over 3 x 10(7) on the PS/SiO2 where the lowest surface energy existed among all the dielectrics. For comparison, the values of mobility and on/off ratio were 0.42 cm(2)/Vs and 1 x 10(6) for thin film transistor deposited directly on bare SiO2 having the highest surface energy.

Aluminum induced crystallization of strongly (111) oriented polycrystalline silicon thin film and nucleation analysis

A polycrystalline silicon thin film was fabricated on glass substrate by means of aluminum induced crystallization (AIC). Al and alpha-Si layers were deposited by magnetron sputtering respectively and annealed at 480A degrees C for 1 h to realize layer exchange. The polycrystalline silicon thin film was continuous and strongly (111) oriented. By analyzing the structure variation of the oxidation membrane and lattice mismatch between gamma-Al2O3 and Si, it was concluded that aluminum promoted the formation of (111) oriented silicon nucleus by controlling the orientation of gamma-Al2O3, which was formed at the early stage of annealing.

Dislocation nucleation governed softening and maximum strength in nano-twinned metals

In conventional metals, there is plenty of space for dislocations-line defects whose motion results in permanent material deformation-to multiply, so that the metal strengths are controlled by dislocation interactions with grain boundaries(1,2) and other obstacles(3,4). For nano-structured materials, in contrast, dislocation multiplication is severely confined by the nanometre-scale geometries so that continued plasticity can be expected to be source-controlled. Nano-grained polycrystalline materials were found to be strong but brittle(5-9), because both nucleation and motion of dislocations are effectively suppressed by the nanoscale crystallites. Here we report a dislocation-nucleation-controlled mechanism in nano-twinned metals(10,11) in which there are plenty of dislocation nucleation sites but dislocation motion is not confined. We show that dislocation nucleation governs the strength of such materials, resulting in their softening below a critical twin thickness. Large-scale molecular dynamics simulations and a kinetic theory of dislocation nucleation in nano-twinned metals show that there exists a transition in deformation mechanism, occurring at a critical twin-boundary spacing for which strength is maximized. At this point, the classical Hall-Petch type of strengthening due to dislocation pile-up and cutting through twin planes switches to a dislocation-nucleation-controlled softening mechanism with twin-boundary migration resulting from nucleation and motion of partial dislocations parallel to the twin planes. Most previous studies(12,13) did not consider a sufficient range of twin thickness and therefore missed this strength-softening regime. The simulations indicate that the critical twin-boundary spacing for the onset of softening in nano-twinned copper and the maximum strength depend on the grain size: the smaller the grain size, the smaller the critical twin-boundary spacing, and the higher the maximum strength of the material.