Micropipes, the hollow cores of superscrew dislocations that lie along the c-direction in SiC single crystals, are quite deleterious to the performance of semiconductor devices. In the x-ray topography of longitudinal-cut samples of these crystals, topographs in the reflection (006) show dislocation image contrast associated with the superscrew dislocations lying along the c-axis of the crystal, which is also the direction of the dislocations' Burgers vectors. In the (110) reflection, whose g-vector is perpendicular to the c-axis and the dislocations' Burgers vector, there is also an image of the superscrew dislocation formed, albeit weaker than the corresponding image in the (006) reflection. This dislocation image is thought to represent stress components of the superscrew dislocation in directions perpendicular to the c-axis.

In order to investigate the origin of these stress components, steps have been carried out to determine whether the dislocation image is anisotropic in all possible reflections where g={110}. To achieve this we have excised a hexagonal prism-shaped sample from a 6H-SiC wafer, 100μm wide, polished along the six {100} crystallographic faces, such that a single micropipe ran along the axis of the sample. This enabled x-ray topographs to be taken through each of these {100} faces