Hydrogen concentration and critical epitaxial thicknesses in low-temperature Si(001) layers grown by UHV ion-beam sputter deposition.

Hydrogen concentration depth profiles in homoepitaxial Si(001) films grown from hyper-thermal Si beams generated by ultrahigh vacuum (UHV) ion-beam sputtering have been measured by nuclear reaction analyses as a function of film growth temperature and deposition rate. Bulk H concentrations CH in the crystalline Si layers were found tio be below detection limits, 1${\times}$1019cm-3, with no indication of significant H surface segregation at the crystalline/amorphous interface region. This is quite different than the case for growth by molecular-beam epitaxy (MBE) where strong surface segregation was observed for similar deposition conditions with average CH values of 1${\times}$1020cm-3 in the amorphous overlayer. The markedly decreased H concentrations in the present experiments are due primarily to hydrogen desorption by incident hyperthermal Si atoms. Reduced H surface coverages during growth combined with collisionally-induced filling of interisland trenches and enhanced interlayer mass transport provide an increase in critical epitaxial thicknesses by up to an order of magnitude over previous MBE results.