Overview of Silicon-Based Materials

Abstract

A comprehensive review, including some recent results, of the structures, properties and fabrication methods of inorganic and organic silicon-based materials with backbone dimensions from 0 to 3 is presented. Quantum effects in low-dimensional silicon structures are discussed using organosilicon materials, such as polyhedral compounds and oligosilanes (quantum dots), polysilanes (quantum wires), heterocopolymers (one-dimensional superlattices), and polysilynes (quantum planes). The luminous properties of silicon-based materials are also summarized.

Vibrational and Electronic Excitations in Poly(methylphenylsilane) and Poly(diphenylsiloxane) Films: Surface Aspects

“…1 With the exception of polysiloxanes, where fundamental studies and applications are quite advanced, 2 most other inorganic polymers, and especially polysilanes, are objects of intense investigation. 3 However, as far as film and surface characterization is concerned, no information is available in the literature. Polysilanes and polysiloxanes are chainlike polymers with silicon backbone and organic substituent groups.…”

Fullerene on Nitrogen-Adsorbed Cu(001) Nanopatterned Surfaces: From Preferential Nucleation to Layer-by-Layer Growth

“…Selective nucleation on this nanopatterned surface was previously reported for the deposition of various metals and is expected to be a fairly general behavior. 14,15,18 An increase of C 60 coverage to ∼0.28 ML naturally leads to the saturated adsorption of C 60 on clean Cu areas forming a 2D C 60 molecular nanomesh with a single molecular layer height as shown in Figure 2b. This 2D nanomesh follows the grids of the template and thus is highly regular.…”

“…The use of surface cues to guide adsorption processes 13 has been demonstrated on a variety of spontaneously nanostructured substrates such as dislocation networks, 6 vicinal surfaces, 7 self-ordered biphase systems, 14,15 and so on. Molecular assembly on crystal surfaces is determined by a delicate balance between adsorbate-adsorbate and adsorbate-substrate interactions.…”

“…Among self-organized nanotemplates, we propose using the complex patterns of the Cu(001)c(2 × 2)-N 16,17 surfaces, which have been used as templates for the controlled growth of several metal-nanoisland arrays. 14,15,18 The directed assembly of molecular nanostructures on this nanopatterned template has not been investigated thus far.…”

π conjugation in the epitaxial Si(111)- 3×3 surface: Unconventional “bamboo hat” bonding geometry for Si

“…On the other hand, the surface properties of Si have been extensively studied for many decades, because of its extraordinary importance to electronic devices [22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29]. The basic surface reconstruction of Si was considered well understood, such as the (7×7) reconstruction for the annealed and the (2×1) reconstruction for the cleaved Si(111) surface.…”