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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 February 2011
The Monte Carlo (MC) technique has been frequently used to model semiconductor thin-film epitaxy, especially for the cases of homo-epitaxial growth on Si (100) and GaAs (100) surfaces. In a recent paper, it was shown that excellent qualitative agreement can be obtained between the surface step density evolution as simulated by a simple cubic MC model and the experimentally observed RHEED specular intensity oscillations on stepped GaAs (100) substrates during growth by MBE [1]. The simple cubic model performs well for this case because of the rectangular arrangement of the gallium atoms in the (100) planes of the gallium sublattice. For the case of the (111) surface, however, the gallium atoms in the (111) plane of the gallium sublattice are hexagonally arranged. This system is not amenable to simulation with a simple cubic MC model. In this work, GaAs [111]B epitaxy is modeled using the MC method on a zincblende lattice. To ourknowledge this is the first application of this technique to the growth of a zincblende thin-film in the [11]B direction..The predicted surface step density evolution is compared to experimental RHEED specular intensity oscillations. The relative merits of using on-axis and off-axis substrates are explored.