Structural and optical properties of II–VI thin films and II–VI multilayered structures grown on silicon by laser ablation

Pulsed laser assisted deposition (PLAD) was shown to be a powerful and versatile technique to obtain highly oriented thin films of CdSe and CdSe/CdTe multilayers on silicon substrate. In multilayer deposition the choice of the buffer layer is crucial and very important if very thin layers have to be deposited in the aim of obtaining superlattices. II–VI compounds such as CdSe, CdTe, CdS were deposited by laser ablation on Si in the aim of verify which of them is the best as buffer layer. The effect of the substrate temperature on film orientation and composition has been investigated by X-ray diffraction and photoluminescence (PL) measurements. Multilayered structures were also deposited by PLAD on silicon and X-ray analysis were carried out on bilayers of CdS/CdSe/Si. Temperature dependence of photoluminescence spectra of CdSe, CdS and CdS/CdSe films on Si substrates are reported. The best resolved intrinsic photoluminescence features were obtained for films deposited on Si(111).