Molecular-Beam Epitaxy

The growth in the use of single-crystal, multilayer, III-V semiconductor structures in optoelectronics and high-speed electronics has spurred the development of a variety of methods for precision crystal epitaxy. Among these are beam-epitaxy methods that use as sources either single elements or several combinations of simple chemical compounds. These molecular-beam-epitaxy methods permit the growth of very-high-quality structures with extremely thin layers, almost atomically smooth interfaces, and large and abrupt changes in doping. These growth methods have been the major source of prototype multilayer, III-V semiconductor structures (heterostructures) for basic physics and device studies, and show increasing promise as production methods for such structures.