MBE growth of tensile-strained Ge quantum wells and quantum dots

Germanium (Ge) has gained much interest due to the potential of becoming a direct band gap material and an efficient light source for the future complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) compatible photonic integrated circuits. In this paper, highly biaxial tensile strained Ge quantum wells (QWs) and quantum dots (QDs) grown by molecular beam epitaxy are presented. Through relaxed step-graded InGaAs buffer layers with a larger lattice constant, up to 2.3% tensile-strained Ge QWs as well as up to 2.46% tensile-strained Ge QDs are obtained. Characterizations show the good material quality as well as low threading dislocation density. A strong increase of photoluminescence (PL) with highly tensile strained Ge layers at low temperature suggests the existence of a direct band gap semiconductor.