Heteroepitaxial growth of InN on GaN intermediate layer by PA-MOMBE

In this paper, high-quality wurtzite indium nitride was epi-grown on sapphire substrates by plasma-assisted metal-organic molecule beam epitaxy system (PA-MOMBE). Structural and electrical properties of the InN films were significantly improved by employing a GaN buffer layer. In addition, high-resolution X-ray diffraction, field emission scanning electron microscopy, transmission electron microscopy (TEM), Hall Effect, Raman and photoluminescence spectroscopy were carried out to characterize the effect of the growth temperature on structural and optoelectronic properties. It was found that highly c-axis oriented InN epilayer can be obtained by optimizing growth conditions. TEM images reveal that the epitaxially grown InN/GaN interface is sharp, and the spacing of the InN(0 0 0 2) lattice plane is about 0.57 nm. Raman spectra also show a sharp peak at 491 cm−1 attributed to the E2(high) mode of wurtzite InN. These results indicate that the improvement of InN material quality can be achieved using heteroepitaxy on GaN/sapphire templates.