Damage production in GaAs during MeV ion implantation

The influence of the nuclear and electronic energy loss on the damage production in GaAs has been studied by Se⁺ ion implantation at T_I = 293 K with energies ranging from 2 MeV up to 20 MeV. The ion dose was varied between 5 × 10¹² /cm² and 1 × 10¹⁵ /cm². The damage production was investigated using RBS in channeling regime. Temperature and energy dependent backscattering measurements and TEM investigations were performed to study the kind of defects in more detail. The resulting defect profiles are compared with the depth distribution of the nuclear and electronic energy loss which were simulated by TRIM 87. The results show that the remaining defect concentration strongly decreases with increasing implantation energy even if the same energy density is deposited into nuclear processes. We suppose, that the electronic energy loss increases the defect transformation and annealing during implantation at T_I = 293 K. The defects in the samples implanted with energies greater than 5 MeV are characterized as point defects, point defect clusters and small dislocation loops; the kind of defects are the same over the whole implantation depth and the existence of amorphous zones can be widely excluded.