Effect of dislocations on electrical and electron transport properties of InN thin films. II. Density and mobility of the carriers

Abstract

The influence of dislocations on electron transport properties of undoped InN thin films grown by molecular-beam epitaxy on AlN 0001 pseudosubstrates is reported. The microstructure and the electron transport in InN 0001 films of varying thickness were analyzed by transmission electron microscopy and variable temperature Hall-effect measurements. It was found that crystal defects have strong effects on the electron concentration and mobility of the carriers in the films. In particular, the combined analysis of microscopy and Hall data showed a direct dependence between free carrier and dislocation densities in InN. It was demonstrated that threading dislocations are active suppliers of the electrons and an exponential decay of their density with the thickness implies the corresponding decay in the carrier density. The analysis of the electron transport yields also a temperature-independent carrier concentration, which indicates degenerate donor levels in the narrow band-gap InN material. The relative insensitivity of the mobility with respect to the temperature suggests that a temperature-independent dislocation strain field scattering dominates over ionized impurity/defect and phonon scattering causing the increase of the mobility with rising layer thickness due to the reducing dislocation density. Room temperature mobilities in excess of 1500 cm2 V−1 s−1 were obtained for 800 nm thick InN layers with the dislocation densities of 3 109 cm−2.