Hydrogen-mediated quenching of strain-induced surface roughening during gas-source molecular beam epitaxy of fully coherent Si(sub 0.7) Ge(sub 0.3) layers on Si(001)

Scanning tunneling microscopy (STM), atomic force microscopy (AFM), and x-ray reflectivity (XXR) was used to investigate the effects of varying tetha(sub H) on surface morphological evolution during Si(sub 0.7) Ge(sub 0.3) growth on Si(001) by GS-MBE at temperatures T(sub s)=450, 500, and 55 degrees Celsius and thinknesses t up to the critical value for misfit dislocations. The differences in surface morphological evolution observed suggests that tetha(sub H) plays an important role in mediating the kinetics of strain-induced roughening through changes in film growth rates as well as adatom mean-free paths and step-crossing probabilities.