Scanning tunneling microscopy study of GaAs(1 0 0) surface prepared by HCl-isopropanol treatment

In this letter, scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) is utilized to investigate surface morphology and a local atomic structure of the GaAs(1 0 0) surfaces prepared by the HCl-isopropanol (HCl-iPA) treatment and annealing in ultrahigh vacuum (UHV). Low-energy electron diffraction (LEED) reveals that the (2×4) reconstruction appears on the HCl-iPA treated GaAs(1 0 0) surface after an UHV annealing at 300 °C. According to the STM images, this (2×4) structure is γ phase. Both LEED and STM suggest improvement in surface quality of the HCl-iPA GaAs(1 0 0) with increasing the annealing temperature in the range of 300–400 °C.