Tunable magneto-transport properties in ultra-high Bi-doped Si prepared by liquid phase epitaxy

Abstract

During the past decades, excavating the novel functional materials towards CMOS-compatible spin-transport devices has been treated as one of the most urgent tasks to revolutionize the current Si-based nonmagnetic spintronics. Among various strategies, triggering the exotic physics in Si via utilizing heavy-element hyperdoping is the most straightforward way to achieve the abovementioned expectation. In this work, by using liquid phase epitaxy growth, we have achieved the highest Bi doping level in Si up to 2.0 × 1021 cm−3. The resulting Bi-hyperdoped Si layers are confirmed to be single-crystalline and epitaxially regrown without extended defects or Bi agglomerates via various microstructural analysis. The Bi-hyperdoped Si layers exhibit a metallic-like behavior with the carrier densities up to 1.55 × 1015 cm−2 and a prominent electrical activation yield around 50 %. Negative magnetoresistance due to magnetic-field suppressed weak localization at both sides of the insulator-to-metal transition is observed. Tunable magneto-transport properties are realized in ultra-high Bi doped Si epilayers by controlling the donor concentration. This provides new possibilities for designing Si devices that integrate spin-charge conversion and spin transport. This work promises to enable heavy-element hyperdoped semiconductor epilayers as novel spin-based electronics material platform via a chip-technology compatible approach.