Effect of ion species on the accumulation of ion-beam damage in GaN

Wurtzite GaN epilayers bombarded with a wide range of ion species (10 keV ¹H, 40 keV ¹²C 50 keV ¹⁶O, 600 keV ²⁸Si. 130 keV ⁶³Cu, 200 keV ¹⁰⁷Ag, 300 keV ¹⁹⁷Au, and 500 keV ²⁰⁹Bi) are studied by a combination of Rutherford backscattering/channeling (RBS/C) spectrometry and cross-sectional transmission electron microscopy. Results show that strong dynamic annealing processes lead to a complex dependence of the damage-buildup behavior in GaN on ion species. For room -temperature bombardment with different ion species, bulk disorder, as measured by RBS/C, saturates at some level that is below the random level, and amorphization proceeds layer-by-layer from the GaN surface with increasing ion dose. The saturation level of bulk disorder depends on implant conditions and is much higher for light-ion bombardment than for the heavy-ion irradiation regime. In the case of light ions, when ion doses needed to observe significant lattice disorder in GaN are large (≳ 10¹⁶ cm^-2), chemical effects of implanted species dominate. Such implanted atoms appear to stabilize an amorphous phase in GaN and/or to act as effective traps for ion-beam-generated mobile point defects and enhance damage buildup. In particular, the presence of a large concentration of carbon in GaN strongly enhances the accumulation of implantation-produced disorder. For heavier ions, where chemical effects of implanted species seem to be negligible, an increase in the density of collision cascades strongly increases the level of implantation-produced lattice disorder in the bulk as well as the rate of layerby-layer amorphization proceeding from the surface. Such an increase in stable damage and the rate of planar amorphization is attributed to (i) an increase in the defect clustering efficiency with increasing density of ion-beam-generated defects and/or (ii) a superlinear dependence of ion-beam-generated defects, which survive cascade quenching, on the density of collision cascades. Physical mechanisms responsible for such a super-linear dependence of ion-beam-generated defects on collision cascade density are considered. Mechanisms of surface and bulk amorphization in GaN are also discussed.