LAUSR

Cadmium Telluride (CdTe) thin films are important materials for optoelectronic and radiation detection applications. Fabrication of CdTe films has been studied using a variety of substrates via heteroepitaxial growth. As a result of the lattice mismatch strain, the CdTe films usually contain threading and misfit dislocations that limit device performance. Recently, a remote epitaxy technique [1] was demonstrated for homoepitaxial systems by transferring a graphene sheet onto the substrate before deposition of the film. Applied to a heteroepitaxial system, this type of compliant interface would allow for the accommodation of misfit strain due to weakened interfacial bonding. In this current work, a similar compliant interface is created by direct growth [2], without the use of pre-transferred graphene, and instead by the self-assembly of a Tellurium (Te) monolayer at the interface [3]. Utilizing pulsed laser deposition (PLD), high-quality epitaxial CdTe films can be grown on sapphire and then transferred from their substrate to be freestanding leaving the substrate for subsequent growths.