Effects of substrate temperature on microstructural and photoluminescent properties of nanocrystalline silicon carbide films

✍ Scribed by Wei Yu; Xinzhan Wang; Wanbing Lu; Shufang Wang; Yalan Bian; Guangsheng Fu

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2010
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 410 KB
• Volume: 405
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0921-4526
• DOI: 10.1016/j.physb.2009.12.056

✦ Synopsis

Nanocrystalline silicon carbide (nc-SiC) thin films have been grown on silicon (1 0 0) substrates by helicon wave plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition technique and the photoluminescence of the films has been tuned from yellow to blue by changing the substrate temperatures (T s ). The resulting nc-SiC films show a microstructure of 3C-SiC nanocrystallites embedded in hydrogenated amorphous SiC matrix. Detailed analysis of the infrared absorption reveals that the degree of crystallization of the films increases with the increase of T s while the content of hydrogen-related bonds in the films is decreased. The photoluminescence spectra of the nc-SiC films are found to be composed of two Gaussian components. As the T s increases, the component with higher energy shows a growing trend and the corresponding peaks move to high energy side, indicating that the main luminescence mechanism in the films changes from the defect-related carrier recombination to the quantum confinement effect.