Gas Source Melecular Beam Epitaxy Growth of High Quality AlGaAs Using Trimethylamine Alane as the Aluminum Source

We investigated the dependence of the background impurity incorporation on growth conditions and optical properties of undoped AlGaAs grown by gas source molecular beam epitaxy using trimethylamine alane (TMAAl), triethylgallium, and arsine. The use of TMAAl enabled us to reduce the carbon concentration (7×1016cm-3) to over one order of magnitude less than that using triethylaluminum (TEAl). The 77 K photoluminescence spectrum of undoped AlGaAs grown using TMAAl was dominated by excitonic band-edge emission not observable in AlGaAs grown using TEAl. Furthermore, we report for the first time the doping characteristics of n-type AlGaAs grown using disilane (Si2H6) as an n-type gaseous dopant source together with TMAAl. The carrier concentration (5×1017-3×1018cm-3) in n-AlxGa1-xAs (x=0.09-0.27) was reliably controlled and showed the same Si2H6flow rate dependence as that of GaAs. The activation efficiency of silicon was more than 60%. We demonstrated the excellent n-type doping characteristics by uisng TMAAl.