Asymmetric interfacial abruptness in N-polar and Ga-polar GaN/AlN/GaN heterostructures

In this letter, we report on the interfacial abruptness of GaN/AlN/GaN heterostructures with pulsed laser atom probe tomography (APT). The samples were grown by plasma-assisted molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) under both metal-rich and N-rich conditions on both Ga-polar (0001) GaN templates and N-polar (0001) GaN substrates. An NH3 assisted MBE technique was involved to grow similar Ga-polar and N-polar structures on GaN:Fe substrates and GaN/Al2O3 templates, respectively, for a comparison study. We find in all cases the interface with net positive polarization charge was chemically abrupt, whereas the interface with net negative polarization charge was diffuse. We discuss the implications on device design and performance. These data validate the efficiency of APT in studying interfaces for better performance in devices.