Interplay between strain and thickness on effective carrier lifetime of buffer mediated epitaxial germanium probed by photoconductance decay technique

Abstract

We report contactless effective minority carrier lifetime of epitaxially grown unstrained and in-plane <110> biaxially tensile-strained (001) germanium (ϵ-Ge) epilayers measured using microwave-reflectance photoconductance decay measurements. Strained Ge epilayers were grown using InxGa1-xAs linearly graded buffers on (001) GaAs substrates. Using homogeneous excitation of unstrained Ge epilayers, thickness-dependent separation of minority carrier lifetime components under low injection conditions yielded a bulk lifetime of 114 ± 2 ns and low surface recombination velocity of 21.3 ± 0.04 cm/s. More notably, an effective minority carrier lifetime of >100 ns obtained from sub-50 nm 1.6% tensile-strained Ge epilayers showed no degradation relative to the unstrained counterpart. Detailed material characterization using X-ray diffractometry revealed successful strain transfer of 0.61 and 0.89% to the Ge epilayers via InxGa1-xAs metamorphic buffers and confirms pseudomorphic growth. Lattice coherence observed at the ϵ-Ge epilayer and InxGa1-xAs buffer heterointerfaces via transmission electron microscopy substantiates the prime material quality achieved. The relatively high carrier lifetimes achieved are an indicator of excellent material quality and provide a path forward to realize low-threshold Ge laser sources.