An efficient technique for low temperature metal-induced nanocrystalline silicon fabrication is presented. The technique is based on laser annealing of thin films of “amorphous silicon-tin” composites combined with in situ control and monitoring with Raman technique. Laser annealing was shown to provide the possibility of fine-tuning the nanocrystals size and concentration, which is important in photovoltaic and thermoelectric devices fabrication.

Anisotropic nanomaterials possess interesting thermal transport properties because they allow orientation of heat fluxes along preferential directions due to a high ratio (up to three orders of magnitude) between their in-plane and cross-plane thermal conductivities. Among different techniques allowing thermal conductivity evaluation, micro-Raman scattering is known to be one of the most efficient contactless measurement approaches. In this letter, an experimental approach based on Raman scattering measurements with variable laser spot sizes is reported. Correlation between experimental and calculated thermal resistances of one-dimensional nanocrystalline solids allows simultaneous estimation of their in-plane and cross-plane thermal conductivities. In particular, our measurement approach is illustrated to be applied for anisotropic thermal conductivity evaluation of silicon nanowire arrays.

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