In the epitaxial growth of ternary III-V semiconductor alloys, the microscopic diffusion theory was applied to studying the effect of surface reconstruction and the influence of sub-layer atomic diffusion on the CuPt-type ordering process. It was found that the on-site energy induced by reconstruction plays a central role in the kinetic process of the surface ordering. In view of the kinetics it was demonstrated that the surface ordering was frozen in after subsequent coverage and the sub-layer diffusions have little influence on the ordering of the alloy. Consequently, two variants of CuPt-type ordering were obtained through layer-by-layer stacking. Moreover, during the sub-layer ordering process, the order of the sub-layer was shown to transiently overshoot the equilibrium order. The ordering kinetics in the order - disorder heterostructure was also investigated by considering the effects of growth temperature.

A Kinetic Study of the Ordering Process in Ternary III - V Semiconductor Alloys. Z.F.Huang, B.L.Gu: Journal of Physics - Condensed Matter, 1997, 9[27], 5737-49