FABRICATION AND SPECTROSCOPY OF DRY-ETCHED WIDE-GAP II-VI SEMICONDUCTOR NANOSTRUCTURES

Wide-gap II-VI semiconductors have come of age with reports last year of blue lasing action in electrically-driven devices. An ability to create nanostructures in II-VI materials is important both to fabricate structures for physical examination and to make integrated optical devices likely to be required to match this new blue light source. In this paper we report the fabrication process required to fabricate nanostructures with dimensions down to 25nm in a variety of wide-gap II-VI materials using electron beam lithography and reactive ion etching in CH4/H-2. The impact of fabrication steps upon the crystal quality, lattice vibrations and band edge emission has been studied studied by XPS, Raman scattering and low temperature luminescence. No signs of serious fabrication-related damage is found using these techniques thus opening the doors for a whole range of novel semiconductor nanostructures