The effect of compressive biaxial stress on vacancy clustering in thin Si–Ge layers

✍ Scribed by M.G. Ganchenkova; V.A. Borodin

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2006
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 464 KB
• Volume: 9
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1369-8001
• DOI: 10.1016/j.mssp.2006.08.005

✦ Synopsis

The paper presents the results of the study of elastic interaction and clustering of vacancies in Si 75 Ge 25 and Si 50 Ge 50 alloys under plane stress loading, as appropriate to thin SiGe layers grown coherently on top of a bulk silicon substrate. The first-principles calculation of the total energies of vacancy-vacancy and vacancy-Ge atom pairs predicts that the energy of a vacancy pair is sensitive to the pair orientation with respect to the principal crystalline axes. Lattice kinetic Monte-Carlo simulation of vacancy annealing demonstrates that such orientational dependence of vacancy interaction noticeably influences both the kinetics of vacancy annealing at elevated temperatures and the shape of the resulting vacancy clusters.