Light emitting diodes and blue laser diodes grown on GaN have been demonstrated despite six orders of magnitude higher dislocation density than that for III-V arsenide and phosphide diodes. Understanding and determination of dislocation cores in GaN is crucial since both theoretical and experimental work are somewhat contradictory. Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) has been applied to study the layers grown by hydride vapor-phase epitaxy (HVPE) and molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) (under Ga rich conditions) in plan-view and cross-section samples. This study suggests that despite the fact that voids are formed along the dislocation line in HVPE material, the dislocations have closed cores. Similar results of closed core are obtained for the screw dislocation in the MBE material, confirming earlier studies.

GaN has received much attention over the past few years because of several new applications, including light emitting diodes, blue laser diodes and high-power microwave transistors. One of the biggest problems is a high density of structural defects, mostly dislocations, due to a lack of a suitable lattice-matched substrate since bulk GaN is difficult to grow in large sizes. Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) has been applied to study defects in plan-view and cross-sections on samples prepared by conventional techniques such as mechanical thinning and precision ion milling. The density of dislocations close to the sample surface of a 1 mm-thick HVPE sample was in the range of 3x109 cm-2. All three types of dislocations were present in these samples, and almost 50 percent were screw dislocations. Our studies suggest that the core structure of screw dislocations in the same material might differ when the material is grown by different methods.