Laser-excited elastic guided waves reveal the complex mechanics of nanoporous silicon

Marc Thelen, Nicolas Bochud, Manuel Brinker, Claire Prada and Patrick Huber ()
Additional contact information
Marc Thelen: Institute of Materials and X-Ray Physics
Nicolas Bochud: Univ Gustave Eiffel
Manuel Brinker: Institute of Materials and X-Ray Physics
Claire Prada: Université Paris Sciences et Lettres, CNRS
Patrick Huber: Institute of Materials and X-Ray Physics

Nature Communications, 2021, vol. 12, issue 1, 1-10

Abstract: Abstract Nanoporosity in silicon leads to completely new functionalities of this mainstream semiconductor. A difficult to assess mechanics has however significantly limited its application in fields ranging from nanofluidics and biosensorics to drug delivery, energy storage and photonics. Here, we present a study on laser-excited elastic guided waves detected contactless and non-destructively in dry and liquid-infused single-crystalline porous silicon. These experiments reveal that the self-organised formation of 100 billions of parallel nanopores per square centimetre cross section results in a nearly isotropic elasticity perpendicular to the pore axes and an 80% effective stiffness reduction, altogether leading to significant deviations from the cubic anisotropy observed in bulk silicon. Our thorough assessment of the wafer-scale mechanics of nanoporous silicon provides the base for predictive applications in robust on-chip devices and evidences that recent breakthroughs in laser ultrasonics open up entirely new frontiers for in-situ, non-destructive mechanical characterisation of dry and liquid-functionalised porous materials.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-23398-0 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:12:y:2021:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-021-23398-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-23398-0

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().