MBE Growth of Semiconductor Quantum Structures with Type-II Band Alignment and CdSe Thin Films for Device Applications

The first part of this dissertation focuses on quantum structures with type-II band alignment, which are designed for applications in infrared photodetection and optical nonlinearity. A short- and mid-wavelength infrared dual-band optically-addressed photodetector structure has been designed and fabricated by molecular beam epitaxy, which is used to demonstrate the operational principles of optical address for extended tri-band detection. High-resolution x-ray diffraction and photoluminescence measurement were used to characterize the samples and revealed excellent crystalline quality and optical properties. An analytical model has been developed to address the effects of luminescence coupling and light leakage effects in optically-addressed tri-band photodetectors in terms of the absorber thicknesses and photoluminescence quantum efficiencies.Beyond superlattices, asymmetric quantum wells with type-II band alignment find application in optical nonlinearity enhancement which is the result of increased wavefunction overlap and larger electric dipole moments of the interband transitions compared to the conventional structures with type-I band edge alignment. The novel type-II AQW structure exhibits interband second-order susceptibility tensor elements ranging between 20 pm/V to 1.60×103 pm/V for nearly-resonant optical rectification and difference frequency generation applications at near-infrared and terahertz wavelengths, an improvement of nearly one order of magnitude over the type-I structures and one to three orders of magnitude over natural crystals such as LiNbO3, KTP, or GaAs. A factor of 2-3 further enhancement of the tensor elements is achieved by optimizing the well widths and band offsets of the type-II asymmetric quantum wells. The second part of the dissertation reports the study of CdSe thin films with mixed zincblende and wurtzite phases grown on lattice-matched InAs(100) substrate using molecular beam epitaxy. These CdSe thin films reveal single-phase zincblende (ZB) structure with high crystalline quality with low defect density. In contrast, CdSe layers grown on lattice-matched InAs(111)B (As-terminated) substrates under different growth temperatures and Cd/Se flux ratios all have their demonstrated mixed ZB and wurtzite phases in coexistence confirmed by high-resolution x-ray diffraction, transmission electron microscopy and photoluminescence measurements. The reason for these properties is due to the small formation energy difference between the ZB and WZ phases of CdSe, which has been confirmed by density functional theory simulations.