Mosaicity of GaN Epitaxial Layers: Simulation and Experiment

High-resolution X-ray diffraction has been used to analyze GaN epilayers with varying coalescence thickness which were grown by MOVPE on (0001) oriented sapphire. The decrease of the density of edge type threading dislocations with increasing coalescence thickness causes a marked difference in the mosaicity of the samples. As the defects form along the grain boundaries, this corresponds to an increase in lateral coherence length with increasing coalescence thickness. The lateral coherence length has been obtained from simulations of reciprocal lattice points of off-axis Bragg reflections, measured in asymmetric diffraction geometry.