The intensity decay of the oscillation of the reflection high-energy electron diffraction pattern„Ss specular beam is analysed during the molecular beam epitaxy of strained InGaAs/GaAs heteroepitaxial structures. The oscillations' amplitude was found to decrease exponentially with time during the InGaAs growth. Further, the decay time constant decreases with InAs mole fraction, indicating that the lattice strain increases islanding during growth. A simple semi-quantitative model based on the growth front roughening is formulated to explain the results. Assuming that the oscillation decay is related partly to the strain and partly due to kinetic effects during growth, a decay component that is solely due to strain can be separated; we find that the onset of increased roughening due to the misfit strain component roughly corresponds to the equilibrium critical layer thickness for misfit dislocation generation.

Keywords: strained growth, RHEED, InGaAs

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