Synchrotron X-ray diffraction studies of heteroepitaxial ZnO films grown by pulsed laser deposition

Abstract

Heteroepitaxial ZnO films were grown by pulsed laser deposition on various substrates such as GaN-buffered C-Al2O3 C-Al2O3 A-Al2O3 and R-Al2O3 The epitaxy nature of the films was investigated mainly by synchrotron X-ray diffraction The results showed that the GaN interlayer plays a positive role in growing an unstrained well-aligned epitaxial ZnO film on the basal plane of Al2O3 Importantly the ZnO film grown on R-Al2O3 has two differently aligned domains The dominant (1 1 0) oriented domain has much better alignment in the in-plane direction than the minor portion of (0 0 1) oriented domain while in the out-of-plane direction the two domains have almost the same mosaic distribution (C) 2010 Elsevier B V All rights reserved