Compositional bowing of band energies and their deformation potentials in strained InGaAs ternary alloys: a first-principles study

Abstract

Using first-principles calculations, we show that the conduction and valence band energies and their deformation potentials exhibit a non-negligible compositional bowing in strained ternary semiconductor alloys such as InGaAs. The electronic structure of these compounds has been calculated within the framework of local density approximation and hybrid functional approach for large cubic supercells and special quasi-random structures, which represent two kinds of model structures for random alloys. We find that the predicted bowing effect for the band energy deformation potentials is rather insensitive to the choice of the functional and alloy structural model. The direction of bowing is determined by In cations that give a stronger contribution to the formation of the In$_{x}$Ga$_{1-x}$As valence band states with $x\gtrsim 0.5$, compared to Ga cations.