PAMBE growth of GaN nanowires on metallic ZrN buffers - a critical impact of ZrN layer thickness on the growth temperature

The result contained in this repository describe a temperature calibration technique for molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) and its application in controlled growth of GaN nanowires (NWs) on different substrates. We demonstrate that by controlled melting of aluminum wires bonded to the substrates surface, observed on the RHEED screen, it is possible to determine emissivity of the sample. By utilizing this approach we show that a thin buffer layer deposited on a substrate may have a drastic influence on its emissivity. Using bulk emissivity value and disregarding the influence of the thin film may lead to significant errors in temperature measurements during the growth process. To demonstrate significance of this effect we grow GaN NWs on Si substrates with and without additional ZrN nucleation layer and obtain arrays starkly different in both length and density of the nanowires. As the final test, we showed that by using our temperature calibration procedure identical GaN nanowire arrays can be grown on two Si substrates with and without ZrN layers.

A description of the results can be found in the file "readme.txt".