Silicon crystalline

Heath J R 1992 A liquid solution phase synthesis of crystalline silicon Science 258 1131... 

Crystalline silicon has the tetrahedral diamond arrangement, but since the mean thermochemical bond strength between the silicon atoms is less than that found between carbon atoms (Si—Si, 226 kJmol , C—C, 356kJmol ), silicon does not possess the great hardness found in diamond. Amorphous silicon (silicon powder) is microcrystalline silicon. 

In 1824 Berzelius, generally credited with the discovery, prepared amorphous silicon by the same general method and purified the product by removing the fluosilicates by repeated washings. Deville in 1854 first prepared crystalline silicon, the second allotropic form of the element. 

Crystalline silicon has a metallic luster and grayish color. Silicon is a relatively inert element, but it is attacked by halogens and dilute alkali. Most acids, except hydrofluoric, do not affect it. Elemental silicon transmits more than 95% of all wavelengths of infrared, from 1.3 to 6.y... 

Crystalline silicon technology is the most mature and best understood of PV technologies. Researchers have identified the principal barriers that limit efficiency and, as a result, since the mid-1980s laboratory cells have climbed from 18 to - 23% and commercial production from 12 to - 15%. This is a particularly impressive achievement since crystalline silicon was regarded as mature in the early 1980s. 

A concept gaining support is a hybrid approach to making thick crystalline silicon efficient in thin layers. Although conventional crystalline silicon cells have gone from 400—600-p.m thick to 200—300-p.m, thin-film crystalline silicon cells have reached 10% efficiency while being only 10-p.m thick. 

It may occasion surprise that an amorphous material has well-defined energy bands when it has no lattice planes, but as Street s book points out, the silicon atoms have the same tetrahedral local order as crystalline silicon, with a bond angle variation of (only) about 10% and a much smaller bond length disorder . Recent research indicates that if enough hydrogen is incorporated in a-silicon, it transforms from amorphous to microcrystalline, and that the best properties are achieved just as the material teeters on the edge of this transition. It quite often happens in MSE that materials are at their best when they are close to a state of instability. 

Commercially available PV systems most often include modules made from single-crystal or poly-ciystalline silicon or from thin layers of amoiphous (non-crystalline) silicon. The thin-filni modules use considerably less semiconductor material but have lower efficiencies for converting sunlight to direct-current electricity. Cells and modules made from other thin-filni PV materials such as coppcr-indiuni-diselenide and cadmium telluride are under active development and are beginning to enter the market. 

The next step is the hydrogen reduction of the trichlorosilane (Reaction 2 above). The end product is a poly crystalline silicon rod up to 200 mm in diameter and several meters in length. The resulting EGS material is extremely pure with less than 2 ppm of carbon and only a few ppb of boron and residual donors. The Czochralski pulling technique is used to prepare large single crystals of silicon, which are subsequently sliced into wafers for use in electronic devices.1 1... 

The thickness of a photovoltaic cell is chosen on the basis of its ability to absorb sunlight, which in turn depends on the bandgap and absorption coefficient of the semiconductor. For instance, 5 nm of crystalline silicon are required to absorb the same amount of sunlight as 0.1 nm of amorphous silicon and 0.01 nm of copper-indium diselenide. Only MBE and MOCVD are capable of producing such extremely thin films.i l... 

Single-Crystal Silicon. Silicon is still the dominant material in photovoltaic. It has good efficiency, which is 25% in theory and 15% in actual practice. Silicon photovoltaic devices are made from wafers sliced from single crystal silicon ingots, produced in part by CVD (see Ch. 8, Sec. 5.1). However, silicon wafers are still costly, their size is limited, and they cannot be sliced to thicknesses less than 150 im. One crystalline silicon wafer yields only one solar cell, which has an output of only one watt. This means that such cells will always be expensive and can only be used where their high efficiency is essential and cost is not a major factor such as in a spacecraft applications. 

To date, numerous radical-induced hydrosilylations of terminal olefins or acetylenes have been reported for the H-terminated Si(l 11) surfaces. These reactions are mainly performed by using thermal conditions, UV irradiation, or electrochemistry. More recently, a very mild method was developed for the attachment of high-quality organic monolayers on crystalline silicon surfaces. 

Silica, amorphous Silica, crystalline Silicon Silver... 

The presence of a dense material with a varying void fraction results in compressive stress, with typical values of 500 MPa. Compressive stress can be determined conveniently by comparing the curvature of a crystalline silicon wafer before and after deposition of an a-Si H film. 

The optical properties of a-Si H are of considerable importance, especially for solar-cell applications. Because of the absence of long-range order, the momentum k is not conserved in electronic transitions. Therefore, in contrast to crystalline silicon, a-Si H behaves as though it had a direct bandgap. Its absorption coefficient for visible light is about an order of magnitude higher than that of c-Si [74]. Consequently, the typical thickness (sub-micrometer) of an a-Si H solar cell is only a fraction of that of a c-Si cell. 

Many different substrates are used fora-Si H deposition. Usually Corning 7059 glass [390] and crystalline silicon are used for materials research, as both have similar thermal expansion coefficients to fl-Si H. Devices are mostly made on... 

Due to the small emission and absorption cross sections of Er +, a high Er density is needed to reach reasonable values of optical gain. Typically Er densities are between 0.1% and 1.0% (10 -10- Er/cm- ). These values are far beyond the equilibrium solubility limits of Er in silicon. Therefore, nonequilibrium methods have to be used, such as ion implantation. Er implantation in crystalline silicon leads to amorphization, and additional annealing (600°C) is required to... 

In this sub-subsection, the Er doping of amorphous silicon is discussed. The problem of limited solubility of Er in crystalline silicon has been circumvented. However, the electrical properties of pure a-Si are poor compared to c-Si. Therefore, hydrogenated amorphous silicon is much more interesting. Besides, the possibility of depositing a-Si H directly on substrates, i.e., optical materials, would make integration possible. Both low-pressure chemical vapor deposition (LPCVD) [664] and PECVD [665, 666] have been used to make the a-Si H into which Er is implanted. In both methods oxygen is intentionally added to the material, to enhance the luminescence. 

Errors in the low-density regions of the crystal were also found in a MaxEnt study on noise-free amplitudes for crystalline silicon by de Vries et al. [37]. Data were fitted exactly, by imposing an esd of 5 x 10 1 to the synthetic structure factor amplitudes. The authors demonstrated that artificial detail was created at the midpoint between the silicon atoms when all the electrons were redistributed with a uniform prior prejudice extension of the resolution from the experimental limit of 0.479 to 0.294 A could decrease the amount of spurious detail, but did not reproduce the value of the forbidden reflexion F(222), that had been left out of the data set fitted. 

Iversen et al, in their study of crystalline beryllium [32], were the first to make use of NUP distributions calculated by superposition of thermally-smeared spherical atoms. More recently, a superposition of thermally-smeared spherical atoms was used as NUP in model studies on noise-free structure factor amplitudes for crystalline silicon and beryllium by de Vries et al. [38]. The artefacts present in the densities computed with a uniform prior-prejudice distributions have been shown to disappear upon introduction of the NUP. No quantitative measure of the residual errors were given. 

Amorphous or crystalline silicon both react exothermally when heated with alkali-metal carbonates, attaining incandescence and evolving carbon monoxide. 

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