Semiconductor surface and interface dynamics studied in real time by synchrotron x-ray diffraction

We present an overview of in-situ experiments to study molecular beam epitaxial growth by x-ray diffraction and high-energy electron diffraction. The applicability of kinematic theory allows a quantitative evaluation of the surface kinetics on compound semiconductor surfaces; GaAs(001), InAs(001) and GaSb(001) are presented as examples. Both the growth in the layer-by-layer mode and the recovery can be analyzed in considerable detail. As an example of heteroepitaxy, the nucleation and relaxation of hexagonal MnAs on GaAs(001) is presented. We find an extremely anisotropic interface structure with a periodic array of misfit dislocations that can be quantitatively analyzed