Silicon nanoparticle synthesis by short-period thermal anneals at atmospheric pressure in argon

Abstract

Silicon nanoparticles have been studied for a wide variety of applications including nanoelectronic, photovoltaic, and optoelectronic devices. In this work, silicon nanoparticles were synthesized by short-period annealing of silicon-on-insulator substrates to temperatures ranging between 600 and 900 °C in argon gas at atmospheric pressure. Two different top silicon layers were deposited by ion-beam sputtering onto oxidized substrates. The thinner 6 nm top layer samples were annealed to temperatures for 30 s periods while thicker 15 nm top layer samples were annealed for 60 s periods. For both sets of samples, nanoparticles were observed to form at all the anneal temperatures through imaging by AFM. One long-period UHV anneal study, with 30-min anneal times, observed nanoparticle formation at temperatures similar to the current work while another similar long-period UHV anneal reported nanoparticle formation only above well-defined formation temperatures that depended upon the starting top layer thickness. In the current work, the average nanoparticle radius was found to increase both with the final anneal temperature and anneal period. For the highest anneal temperatures of the 6 nm top layer samples, a changing surface topography indicated that the thinner Si source layer was becoming depleted and the nanoparticle formation process was nearing completion. No such changes were observed for the thicker 15 nm samples at the same temperatures.