Strain, doping, and disorder effects in GaAs/Ge/Si heterostructures: A Raman spectroscopy investigation

The present work is devoted to a Raman study of GaAs/Ge/Si heterostructures grown by the vapor-phase epitaxy technique. We first show that the GaAs epilayers are submitted to a biaxial tensile strain. The strain relaxation generates misfit dislocations and thus disorder effects which we analyze in terms of translational invariance loss and Raman selection rules violation. The first-order Raman spectra of annealed samples exhibit an unexpected broadband we identify as due to scattering by a coupled LO phonon-damped plasmon mode. This is corroborated by an accurate line-shape analysis which accounts for the recorded spectra and makes evident the presence of free carriers within the GaAs layers. Their density is estimated from the deduced plasmon frequency and also using a method we have presented in a previous work.