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Dynamics of mass transport during nanohole drilling by local droplet etching

Heyn, Christian, Bartsch, Thorben, Sanguinetti, Stefano, Jesson, David ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0897-1445 and Hansen, Wolfgang 2015. Dynamics of mass transport during nanohole drilling by local droplet etching. Nanoscale Research Letters 10 , 67. 10.1186/s11671-015-0779-5

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Abstract

Local droplet etching (LDE) utilizes metal droplets during molecular beam epitaxy for the self-assembled drilling of nanoholes into III/V semiconductor surfaces. An essential process during LDE is the removal of the deposited droplet material from its initial position during post-growth annealing. This paper studies the droplet material removal experimentally and discusses the results in terms of a simple model. The first set of experiments demonstrates that the droplet material is removed by detachment of atoms and spreading over the substrate surface. Further experiments establish that droplet etching requires a small arsenic background pressure to inhibit re-attachment of the detached atoms. Surfaces processed under completely minimized As pressure show no hole formation but instead a conservation of the initial droplets. Under consideration of these results, a simple kinetic scaling model of the etching process is proposed that quantitatively reproduces experimental data on the hole depth as a function of the process temperature and deposited amount of droplet material. Furthermore, the depth dependence of the hole side-facet angle is analyzed.

Item Type: Article
Date Type: Publication
Status: Published
Schools: Physics and Astronomy
Subjects: Q Science > QB Astronomy
Q Science > QC Physics
Publisher: SpringerOpen
ISSN: 1931-7573
Funders: EU
Date of First Compliant Deposit: 21 April 2016
Date of Acceptance: 22 January 2015
Last Modified: 13 Jun 2023 04:31
URI: https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/89540

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