Homoepitaxial molecular beam growth of InP on thermally cleaned {100} oriented substrates

{100} oriented homoepitaxial films of InP have been deposited by molecular beam epitaxy using the dimer species P2. The starting surface for epitaxial growth was established by thermally cleaning the substrate in a P2 flux in contrast to the generally adopted technique of argon-ion sputtering followed by annealing. Both undoped and Sn-doped InP layers deposited within the temperature range 770–700 K exhibited 77-K mobilities consistent with a compensation ratio ∼ 2. The 77-K external photoluminescence yield of 0.6-μm-thick layers was comparable with that from 2-μm-thick molecular beam epitaxial films of the same free-electron concentrations but grown on surfaces cleaned by argon-ion sputtering.