Effects of strain and local charge on the formation of deep defects in III-V ternary alloys

The effects of external and internal strains and of defect charges on the f ormation of gallium vacancies and arsenic antisites in GaAs and In0.5Ga0.5A s have been investigated by ab initio density functional methods, Present r esults show that a proper understanding of strain and defect charge permits the development of a defect engineering of semiconductors. Specifically, t hey predict that arsenic antisites in InGaAs ternary alloys can form, upon p-type doping in the presence of an arsenic overpressure, even in the case of high-temperature epitaxial growths.