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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 February 2011
The effects of strain and confinement on optical phonons in a Si12Ge4 strained layer superlattice grown by MBE on c-Si (001) were studied as a function of hydrostatic pressure (T = 295 K) using Raman scattering. The change of phonon frequency with pressure, dω/dP, for the principal quasi-confined LO mode in the Ge layers is found to be significantly smaller than that for bulk crystalline Ge because the magnitude of biaxial strain decreases in the Ge layers with added pressure and because the Grüneisen parameter of the confined mode is smaller than that of the Γ-point optical phonon. More generally, it is noted that the magnitude of biaxial strain in many strained layer superlattices initially decreases with the application of hydrostatic pressure, making the structures more stable.