Temperature dependence of strain–phonon coefficient in epitaxial Ge/Si(001): A comprehensive analysis

Abstract

We investigate the temperature dependence of the Ge Raman mode strain–phonon coefficient in Ge/Si heteroepitaxial layers. By analyzing the temperature-dependent evolution of both the Raman Ge─Ge line and of the Ge lattice strain, we obtain a linear dependence of the strain–phonon coefficient as a function of temperature. Our findings provide an efficient method for capturing the temperature-dependent strain relaxation mechanism in heteroepitaxial systems. Furthermore, we show that the rather large variability reported in the literature for the strain–phonon coefficient values might be due to the local heating of the sample due to the excitation laser used in μ-Raman experiments.