Improvement of crystal quality of cubic GaN film using AlN/GaN ordered alloy on GaAs[100] by plasma assisted molecular beam epitaxy

Metastable cubic-GaN (c-GaN) is expected to have many advantages in physical properties over those of the hexagonal phase. Improvement of (AlN)/sub m/(GaN)/sub n/ ordered alloy was achieved by optimizing the nitridation conditions. (m and n represent the number of monolayers in each layer). The ordered alloy is used for uniform effective Al molar content control, which can be achieved by varying the ratio of each layer thickness. This process makes it is easy to maintain high quality stoichiometric growth for extended periods because all constituent layers are binary materials.