Nature of the red photoluminescence in porous silicon

Abstract

Photoluminescence and its excitation, Raman scattering, as well as Atomic Force Microscopy investigations were used to study the photoluminescence mechanism in P-Si. The dependencies of all characteristics on P-Si preparation regimes, the duration of the electrochemical etching process, have been investigated. The influence on the PL spectra of the variation of the excitation light wavelength and storage in vacuum were studied as well. We have shown that the red luminescence band can be decomposed into three elementary bands.