Charge spectroscopy of Si nanocrystals in a SiO₂ matrix

Abstract

For the first time, the recharging of semiconductor nanocrystals (NCs) embedded in a dielectric matrix was studied by means of charge deep‐level transient spectroscopy (Q‐DLTS). Our measured Q‐DLTS spectra were found to arise from two or three transient processes with different activation energies observed in different temperature ranges. We suggest that these are associated with quantum‐confined electronic states in Si NCs. The data obtained were used to extract the energy position of NC levels, the size of NCs, and the typical recharging times of weakly coupled NCs. (© 2009 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)

Phase transformation in SiOx/SiO2 multilayers for optoelectronics and microelectronics applications

“…Atomic analysis tools are crucial to perform such a study. Numerous techniques have been employed in order to study the correlation between structural characteristics (SIMS [11], XRD [12]) and optical or electrical properties (photoluminescence measurements [2,5,8,10], C-V curves [5], and charge spectroscopy [13]). To date electron microscopy is generally used in order to characterize Si-nc based materials.…”

New functional material: spark plasma sintered Si/SiO2 nanoparticles – fabrication and properties

“…Numerous papers report on the emission of Si nanostructures in the wavelength range between 1.2 and 3.5 eV and even in the UV region. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20] The exact positions of the peaks depend on the nanostructure parameters and fabrication technique. A maximum of three peaks were resolved in the PL spectra.…”

“…An ensemble of nanostructured silicon particles embedded into an SiO 2 host has been the subject of intensive research over the last two decades. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20] The main motivation for research in this eld is the fabrication of silicon-based light emitters, which utilize the reduced dimension connement effect to overcome indirect bandgap limitations for radiative recombination in Si. 2,11,12,15 It is also worth citing some other applications of Si nanoparticles, such as photovoltaic cells, 14,21,22 batteries, 23,24 etc.…”