HWE growth and evaluation of CdTe epitaxial films on GaAs

(1 0 0)CdTe epitaxial films were grown on semi-insulating (1 0 0)GaAs substrates in order to determine optimum growth conditions by the hot wall epitaxy (HWE) technique. Further, CdTe epitaxial films with thicknesses of 0.84–14.9 μm were grown under determined optimum growth conditions for studying the effect of the thickness on crystalline quality. The low-temperature photoluminescence (PL) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) were used to evaluate the grown films. The results indicate that the density of extended defects in CdTe films decreases rapidly within 5 μm with the increase of thickness, and that high-quality CdTe epitaxial films on GaAs can be obtained at a thickness of over 10 μm. Several emission origins in PL are also discussed.