학술논문

New approaches for calculating absolute surface energies of wurtzite (0001)/(0001): A study of ZnO and GaN.
Document Type
Article
Source
Journal of Applied Physics. 5/28/2016, Vol. 119 Issue 20, p205302-1-205302-8. 8p. 1 Color Photograph, 1 Diagram, 3 Charts, 3 Graphs.
Subject
*WURTZITE
*THIN films
*SULFIDE minerals
*ENERGY transfer
*ATOMS
Language
ISSN
0021-8979
Abstract
The accurate absolute surface energies of (0001)/(0001 ) surfaces of wurtzite structures are crucial in determining the thin film growth mode of important energy materials. However, the surface energies still remain to be solved due to the intrinsic difficulty of calculating the dangling bond energy of asymmetrically bonded surface atoms. In this study, we used a pseudo-hydrogen passivation method to estimate the dangling bond energy and calculate the polar surfaces of ZnO and GaN. The calculations were based on the pseudo chemical potentials obtained from a set of tetrahedral clusters or simple pseudo-molecules, using density functional theory approaches. The surface energies of (0001)/(0001 ) surfaces of wurtzite ZnO and GaN that we obtained showed relatively high selfconsistencies. A wedge structure calculation with a new bottom surface passivation scheme of group-I and group-VII elements was also proposed and performed to show converged absolute surface energy of wurtzite ZnO polar surfaces, and these results were also compared with the above method. The calculated results generally show that the surface energies of GaN are higher than those of ZnO, suggesting that ZnO tends to wet the GaN substrate, while GaN is unlikely to wet ZnO. Therefore, it will be challenging to grow high quality GaN thin films on ZnO substrates; however, high quality ZnO thin film on GaN substrate would be possible. These calculations and comparisons may provide important insights into crystal growth of the above materials, thereby leading to significant performance enhancements in semiconductor devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]