We have investigated bulk GaN material grown by HVPE either in the conventional polar [0001] direction and
subsequently sliced with nonpolar surfaces or grown in the nonpolar [11-20] direction. Spatially resolved techniques
such as cathodoluminescence imaging and transmission electron microscopy, as well as profile measuring techniques
such as positron annihilation spectroscopy and secondary ion mass spectroscopy were employed to directly visualize the
extended structural defects, and point defect (impurity and vacancy) distributions along the growth axes. A comparative
analysis of the results shows a distinctive difference in the distribution of all kind of defects along the growth axes. A
significant decrease in the defect density in material grown along the polar direction, in contrast to the constant behavior
of the high defect density in material grown along the nonpolar direction points out the low-defect superior quality of the
former material and indicates the preferable way of producing high-quality GaN substrates with nonpolar surfaces.
Defect formation in wurtzite a-plane gallium nitride grown on r-plane sapphire has been studied using transmission
electron microscopy. The observed defect pattern grown along the [11-20] direction shows significant differences
compared to films grown along the [0001] direction. Predominant line defects identified in the a-plane GaN are Frank-Shockley partial dislocations bounding basal plane stacking faults and originating at the film/substrate interface. In order
to understand the impact of the anisotropic elastic properties of the wurtzite structure on the dislocation formation and
the stress around the dislocations anisotropic plane strain elasticity theory was applied and compared with results
obtained from isotropic theory calculations. Furthermore, dislocation properties were calculated for AlN and InN. It was
found that the line energy found for InN amounts only to about one third of the values obtained for GaN and AlN.
We have studied the emission distributions in nonpolar α-plane GaN thick films grown by HVPE using different nucleation schemes. The emission spectra show in addition to the near band edge emission band, also defect related bands due to different structural defects being enhanced/reduced to different extent in samples grown on different templates. Spatially resolved cathodoluminescence imaging reveals the in-plane distributions of the respective emission bands, which allows us to correlate the emissions with particular stacking fault structural defects independently revealed by plan-view transmission electron microscopy. In addition, emission distributions were visualized in vicinity of largescale defects like surface triangle pits, depressions and cracks attributed to prevailing defect formation and/or impurity incorporation.
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