Structural and Optical Properties of Silicon Nanoparticles

Author(s)

Rogério José Baierle

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Instituto de Física (IF/SBI)
• Defense date: 1997-06-17

Examining board members

Marilia Junqueira Caldas; Pierre Basmaji; Hélio Chacham; Adalberto Fazzio; Omar Teschke

• Advisor: Marilia Junqueira Caldas

Abstract

We study the properties of hydrogenated Si nanoparticles, also under surface oxidation, as a model-material to understand porous Silicon. To do that we developed a procedure designed to calculate geometries, vibrational properties and optical spectra for complex semiconductor systems, using semiempirical Quantum Chemistry techniques. The adopted techniques were thoroughly reparametrized for the Si and O atoms, and we thus present here the new parametrizations that we call AM1/Crystal and ZINDO/Crystal. Contrary to the bulk crystal, porous Si is known to emit visible light, efficiently, with bands in the red-orange and green regions. This behavior has been ascribed to quantum confinement in crystalline nanostructures created by the porosity, which should account both for the blue shift of the optical thereshold and for the emission efficiency. Our results for different nanoparticles confirm the crystallinity of the structures, and show a blue shift of the first absorption peak with decreasing diameter. However the absorption peak energy for nanoparticles with effective diameter around 15 Å lies around 3eV, much higher than the red-orange emission. A study of structural relaxation in the first excited state reveals a strong local distortion that creates a surface defect, in which an hydrogen atom \"bridges a pair of surface silicon atoms. In this Si-H-Si configuration the nanoparticles emit light of much lower energy (red-orange), which is virtually independent of diameter. Surface oxidation also has very little influence on the energy of the emitted light.Based on our results, we associate the optical activity of porous silicon to quasi- spherical nanocrystalline regions in the material. Both the absorption and green emission occur in the core of the crystallites, and shows blue-shift, with decreasing size; the red-orange luminescence occurs at the surface, through photo- generated defects, being thus pinned in energy. The blue shift of absorption with oxidation we interpret as being due to decrease in crystallite size, and the decrease in luminescence intensity as being due to \"hardening\" of the oxidized surface, which decreases the total number of sites for photogeneration of defects. (AU)