Silicon nanowires have been grown with gallium as catalyst by plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition. The morphology and crystalline structure has been studied by electron microscopy and Raman spectroscopy as a function of growth temperature and catalyst thickness. We observe that the crystalline quality of the wires increases with the temperature at which they have been synthesized. The crystalline growth direction has been found to vary between 111 and 112 , depending on both the growth temperature and catalyst thickness. Gallium has been found at the end of the nanowires, as expected from the vapor-liquid-solid growth mechanism. These results represent good progress towards finding alternative catalysts to gold for the synthesis of nanowires.
The synthesis of silicon nanowires by Ga-assisted plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) has been recently demonstrated. In the present work, we study in detail the structural characteristics of the synthesized nanowires. High resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM) analysis reveals the existence of various types of structural defects, which can be classified mainly according to the orientation into axial twins, lateral twins, and transverse twins. We compare our results with previous studies of Si nanowires synthesized with other catalyst metals. Understanding both the origin and the effects of the observed defects is important for technological applications. The presence of twinned domains changes locally the structure of the material. As a consequence, one should find a different local density of states and band gap, which should result in a variation of the carrier transport and optical properties of the nanowires.
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