Paramorphic growth: A new approach in mismatched heteroepitaxy to prepare fully relaxed materials

We propose paramorphic growth as a new approach for growing thick, ideally relaxed, epitaxial layers on mismatched substrates. First, a thin seed laye r, originally grown pseudomorphically strained on a mismatched substrate co ated with a sacrificial layer, is separated by chemical etching from its or iginal substrate and subsequently deposited on the final substrate after br ing elastically relaxed. Consequently, thick layers, lattice matched to the cubic-relaxed seed layer, can be grown epitaxially without the introductio n of any structural defects. The validity of this approach is demonstrated by growing fully relaxed In(0.65)Gi(0.35)As thick layers on 300 x 300 mu m( 2) platforms deposited on an InP substrate, using molecular beam epitaxy.