| A theory explaining the role of stress in impurity-free vacancy disordering was developed and used to explain the intermixing observed beneath arrays of silica stripes with stripe widths ranging from 1 micron to 12 microns. Silica gratings were fabricated on top of a GaAs wafer with a double quantum well epilayer structure, rapid thermal annealing was conducted at a temperature of 950°C, and the results were characterized using micro-PL characterization. The measurements showed that a correlation exists between the shape of the expected stress fields and the amount of intermixing achieved across a grating. The PL measurements could be explained using numbers attained from the simulations generated from first principles. This opens the door to new possibilities in the study of EFVD, as previous efforts have failed to connect intermixing and stress fields in a rigorous mathematical sense. |
