Pressure-induced amorphization and an amorphous–amorphous transition in densified porous silicon

Sudip K. Deb, Martin Wilding, Maddury Somayazulu and Paul F. McMillan ()
Additional contact information
Sudip K. Deb: Bhabha Atomic Research Centre
Martin Wilding: Thermochemistry Facility, University of California at Davis
Maddury Somayazulu: HPCAT, Advanced Photon Source, Argonne National Laboratories
Paul F. McMillan: Christopher Ingold Laboratories, University College London

Nature, 2001, vol. 414, issue 6863, 528-530

Abstract: Abstract Crystalline and amorphous forms of silicon are the principal materials used for solid-state electronics and photovoltaics technologies. Silicon is therefore a well-studied material, although new structures and properties are still being discovered1,2,3,4. Compression of bulk silicon, which is tetrahedrally coordinated at atmospheric pressure, results in a transition to octahedrally coordinated metallic phases5. In compressed nanocrystalline Si particles, the initial diamond structure persists to higher pressure than for bulk material, before transforming to high-density crystals6. Here we report compression experiments on films of porous Si, which contains nanometre-sized domains of diamond-structured material7,8,9. At pressures larger than 10 GPa we observed pressure-induced amorphization10,11. Furthermore, we find from Raman spectroscopy measurements that the high-density amorphous form obtained by this process transforms to low-density amorphous silicon upon decompression. This amorphous–amorphous transition is remarkably similar to that reported previously for water12,13, which suggests an underlying transition between a high-density and a low-density liquid phase in supercooled Si (refs 10, 14, 15). The Si melting temperature decreases with increasing pressure, and the crystalline semiconductor melts to a metallic liquid with average coordination ∼5 (ref. 16).

Date: 2001
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/35107036 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:nature:v:414:y:2001:i:6863:d:10.1038_35107036

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

DOI: 10.1038/35107036

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

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