Epitaxial growth of semipolar InAlN films on yttria-stabilized zirconia

Abstract

We report on the epitaxial growth of semipolar InAlN (11¯03) on yttria‐stabilized zirconia (YSZ) by pulsed sputtering deposition (PSD). Unlike the direct growth of InAlN on YSZ that resulted in c‐plane InAlN, the insertion of an InN buffer layer favored the growth of InAlN in the semipolar direction. Phase separation of semipolar InAlN taking place in the films with intermediate indium contents can be suppressed by low‐temperature (less than 400 °C) PSD growth. These semipolar InAlN films grown at low temperatures possessed sufficient optical quality to demonstrate photoluminescence at room temperature.

Indium incorporation and optical properties of polar, semipolar and nonpolar InAlN

“…One of the reasons is the limit of available non-cplane AlN substrates [13,17,21] and templates [25,26]. Additionally, non-c-plane InAlN layers were grown on quasi-UV-transparent templates and substrates, e.g., semipolar (101̅ 3) InAlN on (113) yttria-stabilized cubic zirconia substrates [27], nonpolar (101̅ 0) m-plane InAlN on m-plane GaN substrates [9] and m-plane ZnO substrates [28,29], as well as nonpolar (112̅ 0) a-plane InAlN on (101̅ 2) r-plane sapphire substrates with GaN underlayers [30]. Among these investigated surface orientations, compositional study has only been done for (0001) versus (101̅ 0) InAlN layers [9] and (0001) versus (112̅ 2) InAlN layers [24].…”