Abstract

Damage induced by reactive-ion bombardment from a glow-discharge system causes primarily point defects. These point defects can, in turn, enhance group-III interdiffusion and hence blue-shift the band-gap energy by intermixing GaAs/AlGaAs quantum wells (QWs) during an annealing step. A high-rf-power, and hence high-damage, H₂ plasma process was used here to create point defects on the surface of semiconductor samples. This was followed by annealing to diffuse the point defects down into the QW region. The fuser structure used here contains a of double QW placed 1.3 μm below the semiconductor surface, which is relatively deep for the point defects created by H₂ to reach. Therefore, repeated cycles of plasma exposure and annealing were required to drive-in diffuse the point defects to the QWs, and hence disorder the QWs.

© 1995 Optical Society of America