Nanoscale morphology of multilayer PbTe/CdTe heterostructures and its effect on photoluminescence properties

We study nanoscale morphology of PbTe/CdTe multilayer heterostuctures grown by molecular beam epitaxy on hybrid GaAs/CdTe (100) substrates. Nominally, the structures consist of 25 repetitions of subsequently deposited CdTe and PbTe layers with comparable thicknesses of 21 and 8 nm, respectively. However, the morphology of the resulting structures crucially depends on the growth temperature. The two-dimensional layered, superlattice-like character of the structures remains preserved only when grown at low substrate temperatures, such as 230 °C. The samples grown at the slightly elevated temperature of 270 °C undergo a morphological transformation to structures consisting of CdTe and PbTe pillars and columns oriented perpendicular to the substrate. Although the pillar-like objects are of various shapes and dimensions these structures exhibit exceptionally strong photoluminescence in the near infrared spectral region. At the higher growth temperature of 310 °C, PbTe and CdTe separat...



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