Critical condition for growth of silicon nanowires

Florian Dhalluin (1, 2) , Pierre J Desré (3) , Martien den Hertog (4) , Jean-Luc Rouviere (4) , Pierre Ferret (3) , Pascal Gentile (5) , Thierry Baron (1)

1 LTM - Laboratoire des technologies de la microélectronique
2 DOPT - Département d'Optronique
3 CEA-LETI - Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives - Laboratoire d'Electronique et de Technologie de l'Information
4 LEMMA - Laboratoire d'Etude des Matériaux par Microscopie Avancée
5 SiNaps - Silicon Nanoelectronics Photonics and Structures

The existence of a critical radius on the growth of Si nanowires by the vapor-liquid-solid mechanism is examined. By varying the experimental growth parameters, we have shown a dependence of the minimum nanowires radius with the Si reactive species partial pressure, demonstrating that the critical radius is not a limited one. A thermodynamical model giving a quantitative aspect of the dependence of a critical nanowire diameter on Si supersaturation in a Au-Si droplet is proposed. These results open up a way to grow many kinds of nanowires with nanometric diameter. The size control has important implications for electronic and optical properties of nanowires based devices.

Domaines: Science des matériaux [cond-mat.mtrl-sci]; Micro et nanotechnologies/Microélectronique

Florian Dhalluin, Pierre J Desré, Martien den Hertog, Jean-Luc Rouviere, Pierre Ferret, et al.. Critical condition for growth of silicon nanowires. Journal of Applied Physics, 2007, 102 (9), pp.094906. ⟨10.1063/1.2811935⟩. ⟨hal-00394770⟩