Cadmium telluride (111) epitaxial layers were directly grown by hot wall epitaxy (HWE) on the hydrogen-terminated Si(111) substrate without any preheating treatment. Low-temperature photoluminescence and four-crystal rocking curves X-ray diffraction (XRD) were used to establish the optimum growth conditions for HWE of CdTe/Si(111). Two-step growth regime was originally designed for obtaining high-quality CdTe crystal epilayers for further fabrication of Hg1-xCdxTe infrared detectors. Four-crystal rocking curves XRD data indicate significantly improvement in the crystal quality after applying the two-step growth regime, and the best full-width at half-maximum value of 118 arcsec was obtained for 5 cart thick epilayer. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.