Molecular beam epitaxy

Last updated: September 16, 2009.

Growing crystals is easy. Fill a plastic bottle almost to the top with cold water and place it in a freezer for a couple of hours. Take it out again at just the right time and the water will still be a liquid but, if you tilt the bottle very gently, it will snap into an amazing snow forest of ice crystals right before your eyes! Growing single crystals for scientific or industrial use in such things as integrated circuits is somewhat harder because you need to combine atoms of different chemical elements much more precisely. At the opposite end of the spectrum from growing random ice crystals in your freezer, one of the most exacting methods of making a crystal is a technique called molecular beam epitaxy (MBE). It sounds horribly complex, but it's fairly easy to understand. Let's take a closer look!

Photo: Molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) being used to make photovoltaic solar cells: You can see the beams around the edge that fire molecules onto the substrate in the center. Photo by Jim Yost courtesy of US DOE/NREL (U.S. Department of Energy/National Renewable Energy Laboratory).

What is molecular beam epitaxy?

To make an interesting new crystal using MBE, you start off with a base material called a substrate, which could be a familiar semiconductor material such as silicon, germanium, or gallium arsenide. Then you fire relatively precise beams of atoms or molecules (heated up so they're in gas form) at the substrate from "guns" called effusion cells. You need one "gun" for each different beam, shooting a different kind of atom or molecule at the substrate, depending on the nature of the crystal you're trying to create. The added atoms or molecules land on the surface of the substrate, condense, and build up very slowly and systematically in ultra-thin layers, so the complex, single crystal you're after grows one atomic layer at a time. That's why MBE is an example of what's called thin-film deposition. Since it involves building up materials by manipulating atoms and molecules, it's also a perfect example of what we mean by nanotechnology.

Photo: Molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) in action. Photo by Jim Yost courtesy of US DOE/NREL (U.S. Department of Energy/National Renewable Energy Laboratory).

That's pretty much MBE in a nutshell. If you want a really simply analogy, it's a little bit like the way an inkjet printer makes layers of colored print on a page by firing jets of ink from hot guns. In an inkjet printer, you have four separate guns firing different colored inks (one for cyan ink, one for magneta, one for yellow, and one for black), which slowly build up a complex colored image on the paper. In MBE, separate beams fire different atoms or molecules and they build up on the surface of the substrate, albeit more slowly than in inkjet printing—MBE can take hours! Epitaxially simply means "arranged on top of," so all molecular beam epitaxy really means is using beams of atoms or molecules to build up layers on top of a substrate.

Photo: Molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) means creating a single crystal by building up orderly layers of atoms on top of a substrate (base layer).

Why would you use molecular beam epitaxy?

You might want to create a semiconductor laser for a CD player, or an advanced computer chip, or a low-temperature superconductor. Or maybe you want to build a solar-cell by depositing a thin film of a photovoltaic material (something that creates electricity when light falls on it) onto a substrate. In short, if you're designing a really precise thin-film device for computing, optics, or photonics (using light beams to carry and process signals in a similar way to electronics), MBE is one of the techniques you'll probably consider using. Apart from industrial processes, it's also used in all kinds of advanced nanotechnology research.

Who invented molecular beam epitaxy?

The basic MBE technique was developed around 1968 at Bell Laboratories by two American physicists, Chinese-born Alfred Y. Cho and John R. Arthur, Jr. Important contributions were also made by other scientists, such as Japanese-born physicist Leo Esaki (who won the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on semiconductor electronics) and Ray Tsu, working at IBM. Since then, many other researchers have developed and refined the process.