Room temperature relaxation of irradiated InP, GaAs and InAs characterized with the perturbed angular correlation technique

The structural relaxation of irradiated III-V compound semiconductors InP, GaAs and InAs arising from room temperature annealing has been studied using perturbed angular correlation spectroscopy. Amorphous zones were produced by MeV Ge ion implantation in single crystal substrates at liquid nitrogen temperature. These amorphous zones were found to relax continuously to a disordered state of lower energy with characteristic relaxation times of a few hours to a few days which are described by a double exponential decay function. We attribute this transformation or relaxation of amorphous to disordered material to a process akin to solid-phase-epitaxial-growth.