Researchers led by Professor Martin Gruebele have used high-resolution imaging technology to determine that amorphous silicon is a glass, until hydrogren is added. The group recently published its results in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Amorphous silicon (a-Si) is a semiconductor popular for many device applications because it is inexpensive and can be created in a flexible thin film, unlike the rigid, brittle crystalline form of silicon. But the material has its own unusual qualities: It seems to have some characteristics of glass, but cannot be made the way other glasses are.

Most glasses are made by rapidly cooling a melted material so that it hardens in a random structure. But cooling liquid silicon simply results in an orderly crystal structure. Several methods exist for producing a-Si from crystalline silicon, including bombarding a crystal surface so that atoms fly off and deposit on another surface in a random position.

The group’s observations of two-state dynamics show that pure a-Si is indeed a glass, in spite of its unorthodox manufacturing method. However, a-Si is rarely used in its pure form; hydrogen is added to make it more stable and improve performance.

“In some ways, I think we actually know less about the properties of glassy silicon than we think we do, because a lot of what’s been investigated of what people call amorphous or glassy silicon isn’t really completely amorphous,” Gruebele said. “We really need to revisit what the properties of a-Si are. There could yet be surprises in the way it functions and the kind of things that we might be able to do with it.”

Next, the group hopes to conduct temperature-depended studies to further establish the activation barriers, or the energy “humps” that the clusters must overcome to move between positions.
The National Science Foundation supported this work.

This is an excerpt of a UI News Bureau Article. For more the complete University of Illiniois News Bureau article, please click here.

For more information about Dr. Gruebele, please visit his faculty page.