Reflectance-Difference Spectroscopy: a New Real-Time, In-Situ Analysis of MBE and OMCVD Growth Surfaces.

ABSTRACTReflectance-difference spectroscopy (RDS) is a recently developed optical technique that allows to monitor chemical and structural changes at a growing semiconductor surface, in-situ and in real-time. This technique was applied recently to organometallic chemical vapor deposition (OMCVD) on a [100] GaAs growth surface. The results show that submonolayer coverage of reacted species can be followed by this technique, which provided unique insights into the microscopic growth mechanisms. The time, temperature and pressure dependences of surface coverage show that OMCVD growth is controlled by two basic processes with distinct activation energies, i.e. reversible chemisorption (at -26 kcal/mole), and decomposition (at 39 kcal/mole) of trimethylgallium (TMG) at surface lattice sites. The importance of reversible chemisorption, which is of an excluded-volume type, due to the large size of the TMG molecule, had been overlooked until now in the literature, where only one activation energy was used to describe growth kinetics.