ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the most important epitaxial growth techniques for IV-VI materials and gives an introduction to the basic growth processes involved in molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) growth. Apart from MBE, high-quality IV-VI epitaxial layers and heterostructures also have been obtained by other methods, namely, by liquid phase and hot wall epitaxy. The chapter also describes the strain relaxation processes in lattice-mismatched heteroepitaxy and the growth of superlattices and multilayers, including the growth of self-organized quantum dot superlattices. In liquid phase epitaxy, epitaxial growth occurs on a substrate in direct contact with a supersaturated metal-rich melt contained in graphite wells. Hot wall epitaxy has been used since the early 1970s for the fabrication of high-quality lead salt layers and multilayers. Molecular beam epitaxy offers the highest flexibility of all growth techniques. The beam fluxes in solid-source MBE are generated by thermal evaporation of the different constituent materials in effusion cells.
