Modeling growth, morphology, and composition of ternary III – V nanowires

We have modeled the growth of InGaP wires using Au-assisted MBE growth. Our model takes the effective diffusivities of the group III species as fitting parameters and produces excellent match with a wide range of experimental data. We show that the chemical potential for different species over the 2D surface may be predicted for a given set of process conditions and is sufficient to identify regimes where binary, ternary, or no wires will grow. We show that wire composition and geometry are determined by the balance between diffusion fluxes along the base of the wire for each species, not only the comparative diffusivities of the group III species.