Browsing by Author "Dlamini, Wendy Bonakele."

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57 Fe Mössbauer studies of 57 Mn* implanted III-V semiconductors InP and InAs.
(2011) Dlamini, Wendy Bonakele.; Naidoo, D.; Bharuth-Ram, Krishanlal.
III-V compound semiconductors such as Gallium Arsenide, Indium Phosphide as well as Indium Arsenide have recently demonstrated the capability of applications in high speed semiconductor devices compared to those made from Silicon. As a result, III-V compound semiconductors have drawn attention of material researchers, in particular in understanding the effects that may occur during manufacturing of these devices. Optical and electrical properties of a device may alter when a foreign atom is introduced during the manufacturing of the device. However, the foreign atom may also lead to the formation of lattice disorder (defects). A convenient way of introducing impurity atoms into a substrate and tailoring their functionality for particular applications is by ion implantation. Mössbauer spectroscopy is a useful technique usually utilized for understanding site location of the impurity atoms in a lattice and the formation of defect complexes. The focus of this dissertation is the study of lattice location of ion implanted ⁵⁷Mn/⁵⁷Fe ions in the III-V semiconductors InP, n-type InAs and p type InAs, and the annealing of implantation induced lattice damage in these samples. ⁵⁷Fe Mössbauer spectroscopy studies have been conducted on III-V semiconductors InP, n-type InAs and p-type InAs with the 57Fe Mössbauer state being populated following the implantation of radioactive ⁵⁷Mn⁺ ions which has the advantage that extremely low fluence implantations are sufficient to give data with good statistics. The ⁵⁷Mn⁺ ions were accelerated to 60 keV at the ISOLDE/CERN facility and implanted with fluences of up to 2x10¹² ions/cm² into single crystal samples which were held at 300 –700 K in an implantation chamber. βdecay of the Mn⁺ imparts an average recoil energy of 40 keV to the daughter ⁵⁷*Fe which are then re-distributed onto interstitial and/or substitutional sites, or trapped in defect complexes and damage sites. The Mössbauer spectra were collected with a light-weight parallel plate avalanche counter, with ⁵⁷Fe enriched stainless steel electrodes, mounted on a conventional drive unit outside the implantation chamber. The spectra were analyzed with the Mössbauer fitting code VINDA which allowed for simultaneous fits of the set of spectra for each sample collected at different temperatures. Acceptable fits to the Mössbauer spectra of the InP, n-type InAs and p-type InAs samples required three components: an asymmetric doublet attributed to Fe atoms in implantation induced damaged environments, a single line assigned to Fe on substitutional In sites, and a weak symmetric doublet assigned to impurity-vacancy complexes. In InP there is already an appreciable substitutional Fe (Feѕ) fraction on implantation at room temperature; while in the InAs samples FeS only becomes significant above 400 K. In all samples, the asymmetric doublet dominates the spectra below 400 K. Implantation damage, however, anneals quite rapidly and at high temperatures (above 400 K), the single line due to Feѕ dominates the spectra while the Fe-defect complex dissociates at 500 K. The implantation induced damage is observed to anneal fast in the arsenide samples compared to the phosphide sample. The slow annealing of the damage in InP was supported by the higher Debye temperature (290 K) extracted from the temperature dependence of the site population for the damage site in InP compared with InAs (194 K and 200 K for n-type and p-type, respectively). Variations in the isomer shift and quadrupole splitting for the damage site in InP at high temperatures (above 400 K) suggest structural changes in the neighborhood of the ⁵⁷Fe probe. Furthermore, the isomer shifts of the spectral components were consistent with near trivalent state and fully trivalent state i.e., Fe³⁺ with d⁵ electron configuration for Fe ions in the damage site and at the substitutional (In) site, respectively. The impurity Fe atoms associated with vacancies are identified to be in the Fe²⁺ state with a d⁶ electron configuration.