A recently observed mechanism of elastic stress relaxation in mismatched layers is discussed. The relaxation is achieved by the inclination of pure edge threading dislocation lines with respect to the layer surface normal. The relaxation is not assisted by dislocation glide but rather is caused by the "effective climb" of edge dislocations. The effective dislocation climb may result from the film growth and it is not necessarily related to bulk diffusion processes. The contribution of the dislocation inclination to strain relaxation has been formulated and the energy release due to the dislocation inclination in mismatched stressed layers has been determined. This mechanism explains recently observed relaxation of compressive stresses in the (0001) growth of AlxGa1-xN layers. (C) 2003 American Institute of Physics.

An analysis is presented on the effect of the strain field originating from a subsurface stressor (point source of dilatation or a dilatating ellipsoidal inclusion) on the electronic properties of nitride semiconductors. With good accuracy, real quantum dots can be modeled as such stressors. We consider the following material structure design: a uniform semi-infinite GaN matrix with a buried stressor or a GaN matrix with a single (In,Ga)N quantum well, which is grown pseuodomorphically between the stressor and the free surface. We utilize isotropic elasticity to determine the strain field in the structures under investigation. We then apply a k.p perturbation theory approach to examine the shifts of the conduction and valence band edges caused by the stressor. We find lateral confinement for electrons and holes, which can be proposed for the realization of strain-induced quantum dots in the quantum well. (C) 2005 American Institute of Physics.

This paper presents growth orientation dependence of the piezoelectric polarization of InxGa1-xN and AlyGa1-yN layers lattice matched to GaN. This topic has become relevant with the advent of growing nitride based devices on semipolar planes [A. Chakraborty , Jpn. J. Appl. Phys., Part 2 44, L945 (2005)]. The calculations demonstrate that for strained InxGa1-xN and AlyGa1-yN layers lattice matched to GaN, the piezoelectric polarization becomes zero for nonpolar orientations and also at another point approximate to 45 degrees tilted from the c plane. The zero crossover has only a very small dependence on the In or Al content of the ternary alloy layer. With the addition of spontaneous polarization, the angle at which the total polarization equals zero increases slightly for InxGa1-xN, but the exact value depends on the In content. For AlyGa1-yN mismatched layers the effect of spontaneous polarization becomes important by increasing the crossover point to similar to 70 degrees from c-axis oriented films. These calculations were performed using the most recent and convincing values for the piezoelectric and elasticity constants, and applying Vegard's law to estimate the constants in the ternary InxGa1-xN and AlyGa1-yN layers.