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Perfect crystals grown from imperfect interfaces.

ABSTRACT: The fabrication of advanced devices increasingly requires materials with different properties to be combined in the form of monolithic heterostructures. In practice this means growing epitaxial semiconductor layers on substrates often greatly differing in lattice parameters and thermal expansion coefficients. With increasing layer thickness the relaxation of misfit and thermal strains may cause dislocations, substrate bowing and even layer cracking. Minimizing these drawbacks is therefore essential for heterostructures based on thick layers to be of any use for device fabrication. Here we prove by scanning X-ray nanodiffraction that mismatched Ge crystals epitaxially grown on deeply patterned Si substrates evolve into perfect structures away from the heavily dislocated interface. We show that relaxing thermal and misfit strains result just in lattice bending and tiny crystal tilts. We may thus expect a new concept in which continuous layers are replaced by quasi-continuous crystal arrays to lead to dramatically improved physical properties.

SUBMITTER: Falub CV

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3721082 | biostudies-other | 2013

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other

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Perfect crystals grown from imperfect interfaces.

Falub Claudiu V CV Meduňa Mojmír M Chrastina Daniel D Isa Fabio F Marzegalli Anna A Kreiliger Thomas T Taboada Alfonso G AG Isella Giovanni G Miglio Leo L Dommann Alex A von Känel Hans H

Scientific reports 20130101

The fabrication of advanced devices increasingly requires materials with different properties to be combined in the form of monolithic heterostructures. In practice this means growing epitaxial semiconductor layers on substrates often greatly differing in lattice parameters and thermal expansion coefficients. With increasing layer thickness the relaxation of misfit and thermal strains may cause dislocations, substrate bowing and even layer cracking. Minimizing these drawbacks is therefore essent ...[more]

PMID: 23880632

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Project description:The three-dimensional structures of macromolecules and their complexes are mainly elucidated by X-ray protein crystallography. A major limitation of this method is access to high-quality crystals, which is necessary to ensure X-ray diffraction extends to sufficiently large scattering angles and hence yields information of sufficiently high resolution with which to solve the crystal structure. The observation that crystals with reduced unit-cell volumes and tighter macromolecular packing often produce higher-resolution Bragg peaks suggests that crystallographic resolution for some macromolecules may be limited not by their heterogeneity, but by a deviation of strict positional ordering of the crystalline lattice. Such displacements of molecules from the ideal lattice give rise to a continuous diffraction pattern that is equal to the incoherent sum of diffraction from rigid individual molecular complexes aligned along several discrete crystallographic orientations and that, consequently, contains more information than Bragg peaks alone. Although such continuous diffraction patterns have long been observed--and are of interest as a source of information about the dynamics of proteins--they have not been used for structure determination. Here we show for crystals of the integral membrane protein complex photosystem II that lattice disorder increases the information content and the resolution of the diffraction pattern well beyond the 4.5-ångström limit of measurable Bragg peaks, which allows us to phase the pattern directly. Using the molecular envelope conventionally determined at 4.5 ångströms as a constraint, we obtain a static image of the photosystem II dimer at a resolution of 3.5 ångströms. This result shows that continuous diffraction can be used to overcome what have long been supposed to be the resolution limits of macromolecular crystallography, using a method that exploits commonly encountered imperfect crystals and enables model-free phasing.

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Perfect crystals grown from imperfect interfaces.

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Perfect crystals grown from imperfect interfaces.

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