| Recently, the quaternary III–V material system gallium indium nitride arsenide (GaInNAs) has attracted a great deal of attention for optoelectronic devices such as lasers, photodetectors, and solar cells. However, growth of these materials is complicated by the difficulty of providing reactive nitrogen and getting the nitrogen to incorporate into the crystal lattice.;This dissertation reports on the growth of GaInNAs by molecular beam epitaxy at The University of Texas at Austin. This MBE system uses a radio-frequency plasma with a novel inert gas dilution technique to produce controllable amounts of active nitrogen to the growth surface. Using this technique, a variety of GaNAs and GaInNAs photodetectors have been grown. We report the first GaNAs avalanche photodiode grown on GaAs, with a quantum efficiency of 27% at 1.06μm and a peak bandwidth of 27GHz. We have also grown resonant cavity avalanche photodiodes operating at 1.06μm with 60% quantum efficiency. |
