Ion beam induced modification and nanostructures formation in thin SiC/Pd films on c-Si substrate

Abstract

Ion beam induced modification of thin metallic films is an emerging approach to grow metallic nanoparticles controllably. Modification of thin solid films is helpful in fabricating arrays of nanoscale particles for electronic and photonic devices and for the catalyzed synthesis of nanotubes and nanowires. In this work, the modification and nanostructures formation over the surface of SiC/Pd thin films of 15 and 45 nm thicknesses, grown on crystalline Silicon (c-Si) substrate by electron beam deposition, upon ion irradiation, have been investigated by means of scanning electron microscopy (SEM), energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS), Rutherford backscattering spectrometry (RBS), Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) and Raman spectroscopy. The SiC/Pd bilayer films were irradiated with 100 keV Ar + ions at fluences of 1 × 10 15 and 5 × 10 15 ions/cm 2 at room temperature. The surface morphology from SEM analysis showed the formation of nanoparticles that were interconnected after irradiation. The RBS and EDS results confirmed the presence of Pd, C, O and Si. While the Raman spectrum of the pristine sample displayed only a sharp peak at 520 cm − 1 characteristic to c-Si substrate, the spectra of the irradiated sample red-shifted to lower wavenumbers indicating the appearance of Si nanocrystals.. Hence, ion beam irradiation is a promising method for the fabrication of SiC nanostructures on c-Si substrate.

The disappearance and return of nanoparticles upon low energy ion irradiation

“…In the past decades, nanostructures have been the subject of interest in science and technology thanks to the size-dependent properties being different from their bulk counterparts [1][2][3]. In addition to bottom-up or top-down approaches to synthesize nanoscale materials, ion irradiation has been established as a powerful technique to fabricate and tune their properties for a wide variety of applications [4][5][6][7][8][9]. Whereas the understanding of ion-solid interaction processes in bulk and thin film materials has been developed to an advanced stage [5,10,11], ion-induced processes, effects and reactions strongly differ when nanoscale materials are involved, and the associated understanding requires significant adjustments [7,[12][13][14].…”