Studies On Optical Constants And Room-Temperature Visible Luminescence Of Hydrogenated Nanocrystalline Silicon Thin Films

Silicon, the mainstay semiconductor of today's microelectronic industry in the world, has been hampered to be an efficient light emitter due to its indirect band gap nature. People have tried many approaches to make silicon emit efficiently for the purpose of the integration of optoelectronics and silicon microelectronics, which is the world popular frontier research field, i.e., Si microphotonics. One of these approaches is the fabrication of low-dimensional silicon systems through electronic band engineering such as Si nanostructures (NSs), where nanoscale Si grains are typically embedded into matrix materials ranging from SiO2, amorphous silicon nitride, to hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) via chemical vapor deposition or sputtering methods. Since the breakdown of k-conservation rule during the optical transition in the Si NSs, the probability of transition for radiative recombination is prominently enhanced; people have already realized room-temperature visible emission with tunable wavelength through quantum confinement effect (QCE) in these Si NSs.Hydrogenated nanocrystalline silicon (nc-Si:H) thin films, as one of such kinds of Si NSs where Si nanocrystals are embedded in the a-Si:H network, have attracted considerable interests due to their potential applications not only to light emitting diodes, but also to other optoelectronic devices including thin film solar cells, optical...