Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

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.