Interplay of the disorder and strain in gallium oxide.

Ion irradiation is a powerful tool to tune properties of semiconductors and, in particular, of gallium oxide (GaO) which is a promising ultra-wide bandgap semiconductor exhibiting phase instability for high enough strain/disorder levels. In the present paper we observed an interesting interplay between the disorder and strain in monoclinic β-GaO single crystals by comparing atomic and cluster ion irradiations as well as atomic ions co-implants. The results obtained by a combination of the channeling technique, X-ray diffraction and theoretical calculations show that the disorder accumulation in β-GaO exhibits superlinear behavior as a function of the collision cascade density.