Abstract
In this article, we report an electroless method to fabricate porous hexagonal silicon carbide and hexagonal silicon carbide nanoparticles (NPs) as small as 1 nm using wet chemical stain etching. We observe quantum confinement effect for ultrasmall hexagonal SiC NPs in contrast to the cubic SiC NPs. We attribute this difference to the various surface terminations of the two polytypes of SiC NPs.
Highlights
Silicon carbide has received attention in the last decades due to its unique mechanical and chemical properties that make it a promising candidate for various applications including solar panels [1,2], quantum technology [3,4,5,6,7,8,9] and bioimaging [10,11,12,13,14]
Porous hexagonal SiC has been prepared by electrochemistry [17] or metal assisted etching [18] or a complex method based on those two [19], or etching in alkaline solution [20,21,22], which requires n type [23,24] or p type [25] silicon carbide as a bulk material
Appearance and morphology of the untreated, etched or sonicated bulk samples were investigated by scanning electron microscopy (SEM)
Summary
Silicon carbide has received attention in the last decades due to its unique mechanical and chemical properties that make it a promising candidate for various applications including solar panels [1,2], quantum technology [3,4,5,6,7,8,9] and bioimaging [10,11,12,13,14]. Pristine 3C–SiC can be etched by a mixture of nitric acid and hydrofluoric acid [15] This method, is only applicable to the 3C polytype [16]. Porous hexagonal SiC has been prepared by electrochemistry [17] or metal assisted etching [18] or a complex method based on those two [19], or etching in alkaline solution [20,21,22], which requires n type [23,24] or p type [25] silicon carbide as a bulk material. The “no photon exciton generation chemistry” (NPEGEC) suggests that the position of the band edge with respect to the potential of the reactants is crucial This method paves the way for finding suitable reactants for other polytypes such as 6H–SiC
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