Enable a Facile Size Re-distribution of MBE-Grown Ga-Droplets via In Situ Pulsed Laser Shooting.

ABSTRACT

A MBE-prepared Gallium (Ga)-droplet surface on GaAs (001) substrate is in situ irradiated by a single shot of UV pulsed laser. It demonstrates that laser shooting can facilely re-adjust the size of Ga-droplet and a special Ga-droplet of extremely broad size-distribution with width from 16 to 230 nm and height from 1 to 42 nm are successfully obtained. Due to the energetic inhomogeneity across the laser spot, the modification of droplet as a function of irradiation intensity (IRIT) can be straightly investigated on one sample and the correlated mechanisms are clarified. Systematically, the laser resizing can be perceived as for low irradiation level, laser heating only expands droplets to make mergences among them, so in this stage, the droplet size distribution is solely shifted to the large side; for high irradiation level, laser irradiation not only causes thermal expansion but also thermal evaporation of Ga atom which makes the size-shift move to both sides. All of these size-shifts on Ga-droplets can be strongly controlled by applying different laser IRIT that enables a more designable droplet epitaxy in the future.