The cavities which were formed in these materials and their alloys, by He implantation and annealing, were shown to exhibit a strong short-range attractive interaction with dislocations; with a binding energy that was estimated to be greater than 100eV when they overlapped. The cavities could affect the relaxation of strained Si86Ge14 layers on Si. Thus, cavities at the interface enhanced relaxation rates via the increased nucleation of misfit dislocations, reduced the number of dislocations which extended into the substrate, and could increase relaxation at thermodynamic equilibrium.

D.M.Follstaedt, S.M.Myers, S.R.Lee: Applied Physics Letters, 1996, 69[14], 2059-61