2003/12/23 by K. E. Khor, Sankar Das Sarma, S. Das Sarma +2
Engineering · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Aluminum Alloy Microstructure Properties #Condensed Matter (cond-mat) #Crystallization and Solubility Studies #FOS: Physical sciences #Silicon and Solar Cell Technologies #cond-mat
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.cond-mat/0312593
20 pages, 3 figures
arxiv created 2003/12/23 · openalex publication_date 2003/12/23 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Recent experiments show that the islanding behavior during chemical vapor deposition (CVD) of Si on Si(111) using disilane (Si2H6) is quite different from that due to molecular beam epitaxy (MBE). While the latter can be understood using rate equation theories (RET), the islanding exponent (connecting the power law growth of island density with growth rate) obtained for the CVD growth is a puzzle, with the CVD exponent being almost twice the MBE exponent. We carry out (2+1) dimensional kinetic Monte Carlo(MC) simulations to study this CVD growth. Hydrogen plays a critical role during growth. Disilane breaks up into hydrides on the Si surface. We use MC simulations to explore a number of cases involving one or two migrating species and show that the large islanding exponent is probably due to the presence of two hydrides, one of which has a much shorter lifetime than the other. We modify RET taking this possibility into account in order to shed light on the experimental observation. We calculate the scaling properties of the island distributions using MC simulations and the modified RET, and conclude that the large effective CVD exponents arise from the failure of the simple island number scaling scenario which no longer applies to the two-component situation prevailing under CVD growth conditions.