Light emission from silicon with tin-containing nanocrystals

Abstract

Tin-containing nanocrystals, embedded in silicon, have been fabricated by growing an epitaxial layer of Si1-x-ySnxCy, where x = 1.6 % and y = 0.04 % on a silicon substrate, followed by annealing at various temperatures ranging from 650 to 900. The nanocrystal density and average diameters are determined by scanning transmission-electron microscopy to 1017 and 5 nm, respectively. Photoluminescence spectroscopy demonstrates that the light emission is very pronounced for samples annealed at 725C, and Rutherford back-scattering spectrometry shows that the nanocrystals are predominantly in the diamond-structured phase at this particular annealing temperature. The origin of the light emission is discussed.