Chapter 7
Structuring Possibilities
Abstract Recent developments in the field of semiconductor physics and material
sciences strongly rely on high-quality materials synthesis, such as epitaxial growth
and deposition, and ultra-precise processing techniques, such as etching and milling,
that result in defined mesoscale or nanoscale structures for various studies and applications. Typically, experiments rely on the availability of suitable structures, and
advances in the domain of quantum technologies, laser sciences and nanomaterial
systems would be hardly imaginable without the many key tools developed over the
past decades. In this chapter, some important structuring possibilities that enabled
the work with 2D materials, quantum structures and nanoparticles in the author’s
Habilitation project are briefly summarised. The arbitrary and narrow selection of
examples in the different domains addressed here may merely serve explanatory purposes and provide an overview on possible techniques used in the overall presented
work.
7.1 Epitaxy
Epitaxy refers to the concept of ordered deposition of crystalline materials on top
of crystalline materials. In the simplest case, layered growth of the bare substrate
material can be performed on a crystalline substrate. Typically, for good growth, a
buffer layer is grown on top of the substrate to provide a smooth, as well as defectand strain-free, crystal surface—before the actual structure growth is carried out.
The most prominent use of epitaxy methods is represented by heterostructure
growth. Multilayered structures and thin-layer heterostructures are commonly grown
by molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) [1, 2] and metal-organic vapour-phase epitaxy
(MOVPE) [3], but there are indeed also other (derivatives of these) techniques not
detailed here for the sake of compactness. The map of semiconductors, which plots
the common semiconductors’ energies as a function of their lattice parameters, is
well known in this domain. This bears importance for every epitaxial growth process
due to the strong impact of lattice mismatch on growth quality, as strain and defects
can be drastically reduced when materials with similar lattice constant are grown on
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
A. Rahimi-Iman, Semiconductor Photonics of Nanomaterials and Quantum Structures,
Springer Series in Solid-State Sciences 196,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69352-7_7
209
Structuring Possibilities
Abstract Recent developments in the field of semiconductor physics and material
sciences strongly rely on high-quality materials synthesis, such as epitaxial growth
and deposition, and ultra-precise processing techniques, such as etching and milling,
that result in defined mesoscale or nanoscale structures for various studies and applications. Typically, experiments rely on the availability of suitable structures, and
advances in the domain of quantum technologies, laser sciences and nanomaterial
systems would be hardly imaginable without the many key tools developed over the
past decades. In this chapter, some important structuring possibilities that enabled
the work with 2D materials, quantum structures and nanoparticles in the author’s
Habilitation project are briefly summarised. The arbitrary and narrow selection of
examples in the different domains addressed here may merely serve explanatory purposes and provide an overview on possible techniques used in the overall presented
work.
7.1 Epitaxy
Epitaxy refers to the concept of ordered deposition of crystalline materials on top
of crystalline materials. In the simplest case, layered growth of the bare substrate
material can be performed on a crystalline substrate. Typically, for good growth, a
buffer layer is grown on top of the substrate to provide a smooth, as well as defectand strain-free, crystal surface—before the actual structure growth is carried out.
The most prominent use of epitaxy methods is represented by heterostructure
growth. Multilayered structures and thin-layer heterostructures are commonly grown
by molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) [1, 2] and metal-organic vapour-phase epitaxy
(MOVPE) [3], but there are indeed also other (derivatives of these) techniques not
detailed here for the sake of compactness. The map of semiconductors, which plots
the common semiconductors’ energies as a function of their lattice parameters, is
well known in this domain. This bears importance for every epitaxial growth process
due to the strong impact of lattice mismatch on growth quality, as strain and defects
can be drastically reduced when materials with similar lattice constant are grown on
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
A. Rahimi-Iman, Semiconductor Photonics of Nanomaterials and Quantum Structures,
Springer Series in Solid-State Sciences 196,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69352-7_7
209