Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 February 2011
Using reflection electron microscopy (REM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and Nomarski optical microscopy we obtained direct evidence that local surface strain-fields, originated from misfit dislocations, are responsible for the formation of morphological crosshatches during molecular beam epitaxy of lattice mismatched InGaAs/GaAs layers. A mechanism is proposed to correlate the formation of the crosshatched patterns with the variation of the growth rate across the epitaxial surface under the perturbation of network shaped strain-fields in the surface.