is DISCLAIMER Portions of this document may be illegible in electronic image products. Images are produced from the best available original document. ABSTRACT Highly p-doped ZnTe films have been grown on semi-insulating GaAs (001) substrates by pulsed-laser ablation (PLA) of a stoichiometric ZnTe target in a high-purity N2 ambient without the use o any assisting (DC or AC) plasma source. Free hole concentrations in the mid-1019 cm-3 to >IO& cm-3 range were obtained for a range of nitrogen

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... res The maximum hole concentration equals the highest hole doping reported to date for any wide band gap II-VI compound. The highest hole mobilities were attained for nitrogen pressures of 50-100 mTorr . Unlike recent experiments in which atomic nitrogen beams, extracted from RF and DC plasma sources, were used to produce p-type doping during molecular beam epitaxy deposition, spectroscopic measurements carried out during PLA of ZnTe in N2 do not reveal the presence of atomic nitrogen. This suggests that the high hole concentrations in laser ablated ZnTe are produced by a new and different mechanism, possibly energetic beam-induced reactions with excited molecular nitrogen adsorbed on the growing film surface, or transient formation of Zn-N complexes in the energetic ablation plume. This appears to be thefirst time that any wide bund gap (Eg > 2 eV) II-VI compound (or other) semiconductor has been impurity-dopedfrorn the gas phase by laser ablation. In combination with the recent discovery that epitaxial ZnSel-xSx films and heterostructures with continuously variable composition can be grown by ablation from a single target of fixed composition, these results appear to open the way to explore PLA growth and doping of compound semiconductors as a possible alternative to molecular beam epitaxy.