Such little oxide may come from the natural oxidation of GaAs surface during the period between the finish of sample preparation and the start of XPS detection. In addition, from the X-ray full spectrum of GaAs before and after scratching, no other element or chemical compound was found in the process of the fabrication beside
Akt inhibitor GaAs and its oxide. All these results confirmed that only slight tribochemical oxidation occurred on the GaAs surface during scratching. Since it was reported that the oxide of GaAs has a higher solubility into H2SO4 solution than GaAs substrate [24], the oxide layer may not play a role as etching mask. Therefore, the scratch-induced structural deformation was expected to act as a mask during the generation of GaAs nanostructures in H2SO4 solution. Figure 6 XPS analysis on chemical bonding states of Ga element. The detection were performed on original surface, LY3039478 mw scratched surface, and post-etching surface (scratched surface after etching) of GaAs, respectively. Effect of structural deformation on the friction-induced selective etching To verify whether the scratch-induced structural deformation occurred during the fabrication process, the Raman detection was conducted on original GaAs surface,
scratched surface and post-etching surface. As shown in Figure 7, the Raman spectra of the original GaAs (100) displays both a longitudinal optical (LO) phonon at 290.4 cm-1 and transversal optical (TO) phonon at 267 cm-1[25, 26]. After PERK modulator inhibitor scratching, the LO Raman peak became wider and the positive frequency shift was 7 cm-1 compared to that on the original surface. When the post-etching was finished, the LO Raman peak of the mesa surface showed a negative shift of about 2 cm-1. The shift and broadening of the peaks can be ascribed to the structure Tideglusib disorder of GaAs lattice [27]. Moreover, the positive frequency shift of LO phase is a typical character of residual compressive stress. The higher the residual compressive stress, the greater the density of crystal structure [28, 29]. As shown in Figure 8, the dense structure was expected to delay the diffusion of the etchant into
internal GaAs substrate, which reduced the etching rate of the scratched area. Therefore, the dense structure can act as a ‘mask’ in the friction-induced selective etching of GaAs. It should be noted that compared to solely mechanical scratching, the GaAs nanostructures produced by the proposed method will have relatively lower destruction. Figure 7 Raman detection on GaAs surface. The spectra were obtained from original surface, scratched surface, and post-etching surface (scratched surface after etching), respectively. Figure 8 Schematic picture showing fabrication mechanism of GaAs nanostructure. Fabrication of surface pattern on GaAs surface Based on the friction-induced selective etching method, different patterns were produced on the GaAs surface by a homemade multi-probe instrument [15].