| Crystal Research and Technology |
Quantum dot structures have gained increasing interest in materials science due to their special electrical and optical behavior. A combination of electron-optical techniques is applied to correlate such properties with the morphology and structure of quantum dots in the InGaAs system. TEM techniques, e.g. imaging by conventional diffraction contrast, by high-resolution TEM and by energy filtering (EFTEM) are focused on the determination of parameters, like shape and size of islands, their chemical composition and the complex lattice strain fields. An image contrast analysis in terms of shape and strain demands the application of image simulation techniques based on the dynamical theory and on structure models refined by molecular dynamics or molecular static energy minimization.
Keywords: quantum dots, InGaAs, Transmission Electron Microscopy, crystal structure