Applicability study of the structure-factor phase method for determining the polarity of binary semiconductors

The structure-factor phase method of convergent-beam electron diffraction (CBED) has been widely applied as an effective tool in determining the polarity of binary compound materials, for example, the typical sphalerite material, GaAs. However, its validity on other polar materials is still unknown. In this paper we extensively investigated its potential applicability onto 11 AB-type semiconductors by dynamical simulations of CBED. Two key factors during the simulation, the difference between A and B atomic numbers and the sample thickness, are discussed in detail. It was found that this method is efficient to determine the polarity for a sphalerite structure under certain conditions, and, reversely, limited to determine the polarity for a wurtzite structure even though it is very similar to the sphalerite structure.