Surface-Based Control of Oxygen Interstitial Injection into ZnO via Submonolayer Sulfur Adsorption

Semiconductor surfaces offer efficient pathways for injecting native point defects into the underlying bulk. Adsorption of a suitably chosen foreign element serves to modulate the injection rate, even at small percentages of a monolayer. Through self-diffusion experiments using isotopic exchange with labeled oxygen, the present work demonstrates such behavior in the case of sulfur adsorption on c-axis Zn-terminated ZnO(0001), wherein the clean surface injects with exceptional efficiency. The experiments provide strong evidence that the injection sites comprise only a small fraction of the total surface atom density and that sulfur adsorption merely blocks those sites. Comparison with related systems shows this simple mechanism is surprisingly uncommon.