Photoinduced surface morphology improvement and preferential orientation enhancement in film deposition of evaporated ZnS

Abstract

Surface photoionization durign the deposition of evaporated ZnS resulted in surface morphology improvement and preferential orientation enhancement of films deposited on quartz and sapphire substrates. Such film quality improvement was induced with very low intensity light as long as photon energy was greater than the band-gap energy of deposited ZnS. These features of the photoinduced effect suggest that enhancement of surface adatom rearrangement occurs through a certain nonthermal process resulting from an excited carrier. Such a nonthermal effect is essentially important for lowering the epitaxial growth temperature.