Growth of crystalline zinc sulfide films on a (111)-oriented silicon by molecular-beam epitaxy

Abstract

The molecular-beam epitaxial growth of undoped ZnS layers on Si (111) is reported. Reflection high energy electron diffraction observations of grown films indicated that the optimum growth conditions necessary to obtain good crystallographic quality ZnS films exhibiting surface reconstruction are a substrate temperature of 300 °C and a molecular-beam flux ratio of 1. The layer growth rate depends on both substrate temperature and the molecular-beam flux ratio of Zn to S, JZn/JS. It was found that the growth rate became constant for JZn/JS ratios larger than 1. For the substrate temperatures larger than 400 °C the growth rate was found to decrease to nearly zero, abruptly.