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Defect reduction in non-crystalline and nano-crystalline thin films: chemical bonding self-organizations and minimization of macroscopic strain

G. LUCOVSKY1,* , J. C. PHILLIPS2

Affiliation

  1. Department of Physics, North Carolina State University Raleigh, NC 27695-8202, USA
  2. Department of Physics and Astronomy, Rutgers University Piscataway, NJ 08854, USA

Abstract

A study of changes in nano-scale morphology of thin films of nano-crystalline transition metal (TM) elemental oxides, HfO2 and TiO2, on plasma-nitrided Ge(100) substrates, and Si(100) substrates with ultra-thin (~0.8 nm) plasma-nitrided Si suboxide, SiOx, x<2, or SiON interfacial layers is presented. Near edge X-ray absorption spectroscopy (NEXAS) has been used to determine nano-scale morphology of these films by Jahn-Teller distortion removal of band-edge d-state degeneracies. These results identify a new and novel application for NEXAS based on the resonant character of the respective O K1 and N K1 edge absorptions. This paper also includes a brief discussion the integration issues for introduction this Ge break-through into advanced semiconductor circuits and systems..

Keywords

Semi-empirical bond constraint theory, Chemical bonding self-organizations, Non-crystalline thin films, Nano-crystalline thin films, Advanced spectroscopic techniques, Symmetry adapted linear combinations of atomic states.

Submitted at: July 3, 2007
Accepted at: Oct. 15, 2007

Citation

G. LUCOVSKY, J. C. PHILLIPS, Defect reduction in non-crystalline and nano-crystalline thin films: chemical bonding self-organizations and minimization of macroscopic strain, Journal of Optoelectronics and Advanced Materials Vol. 9, Iss. 10, pp. 2989-2995 (2007)