Etched mesa sidewalls: do they affect growth on pre-patterned GaAs[001] substrates?

The incorporation of cube-corner mirrors into semiconductor microcavity device structures is one way of mitigating the problems of accurately growing two distributed Bragg stack reflectors involving multiple layers of different semiconductor materials. These mirrors can be achieved in-situ through growth on pre-patterned substrates, which makes use of the differences in growth mode between different crystallographic planes. Manipulation of these growth modes by altering the exposed planes on the pre-etched substrates and controlling the growth conditions leads to different sets of planes being formed by self-assembled growth. In this work, we demonstrate that the facets produced during growth by solid source MBE on pre-patterned GaAs [001] substrates formed, by standard photolithography and wet chemical etching, can be manipulated by the initial facets present.