Document Type
Article
Department
Physics (HMC)
Publication Date
2-1997
Abstract
Nanometer-scale crystal silicon films surrounded by SiO2 were prepared by oxidizing silicon-on-insulator substrates prepared from SIMOX (separation by implantation of oxygen) and crystallized hydrogenated amorphous silicon films. Average silicon layer thickness was determined from reflection spectra. When sufficiently thin (<2 >nm), all layers emitted red photoluminescence under blue and UV cw excitation, with a spectrum that did not depend on the mean layer thickness. The spectrum was roughly Gaussian with a peak energy of 1.65 eV, which is lower than for most porous silicon spectra. The time scale for the luminescence decay was ~35 μs at room temperature and ~54 μs at 88 K; the decay was nonexponential and did not exhibit spectral diffusion. Atomic force microscope images of the silicon layers showed that luminescing layers were broken apart into regions ~50-100 μm in diameter, suggesting that luminescence comes only from regions small enough to have no nonradiative recombination centers in the band gap. These results are inconsistent with a simple quantum-confinement model for luminescence in two-dimensional silicon and suggest the importance of radiation from surface states.
Rights Information
© 1997 American Physical Society
Terms of Use & License Information
DOI
10.1103/PhysRevB.55.4563
Recommended Citation
“Photoluminescence properties of silicon quantum well layers,” P. N. Saeta and A. C. Gallagher, Phys. Rev. B 55, 4563 (1997). doi: 10.1103/PhysRevB.55.4563
Comments
This article is also available from the American Physical Society at http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevB.55.4563.