HWCVD-grown Silicon Nanocrystals : A study of the effect of annealing on structures evolved with varying growth rates

Abstract

In this work, we investigated the evolution of Silicon Nanostructures with progressive annealing under different growth conditions. A structure -Si x N y /a-Si/ Si x N y /a-Si -was grown on n-type <100> Silicon substrate using Hot Wire CVD (HWCVD) deposition technique. We report here the growth of Silicon Nanostructures by HWCVD technique with a special focus on the nature and morphology of the nanostructures with variation in growth rate and post-annealing temperature. AFM studies revealed promising results hinting at the presence of Silicon Nanostructures. With progressive annealing the morphology of the Nanostructures changed from particles to sharp pillars particularly in one of the samples elaborated in the text below. FWHM from the Confocal Raman data at room temperature was found to be 3.19 cm -1 with the a-Si peak at 520 cm -1 .