Defect agglomeration induces a reduction in radiation damage resistance of In-rich InxGa1-xN

S Zhang and BW Wang and LM Zhang and N Liu and TS Wang and BH Duan and XG Xu, JOURNAL OF PHYSICS D-APPLIED PHYSICS, 54, 245104 (2021).

DOI: 10.1088/1361-6463/abecb5

To investigate the reason for the reduction in damage resistance of InxGa1-xN with increasing indium (In) content, we used molecular dynamics methods to simulate the threshold displacement energies, the individual recoil damage and the overlapping cascade processes in InxGa1-xN (x = 0.3, 0.5, 0.7) during ion implantation. The average threshold displacement energy of InxGa1-xN decreases a little (from 41.0 eV to 34.6 eV) as the In content increases (from 0.3 to 0.7) and the number of defects produced by individual cascades increases less than 30% with increasing In content (from 0.3 to 0.7), while the overlapping cascade simulations showed that with In content increasing the dynamic annealing processes in cascades were significantly suppressed. Thus, the suppression of dynamic annealing in the cascades is the main reason for the reduction of damage resistance of InxGa1-xN by adding In content. The analysis of defect distribution during overlapping cascades showed that defects in In-rich InxGa1-xN (x = 0.7) agglomerate more rapidly as the irradiation dose increases and are likely to form large clusters, which are harder to anneal during cascade evolution. Therefore, the suppression of dynamic annealing in In-rich InxGa1-xN can be attributed to the rapid agglomeration of defects with the irradiation dose.

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