Metastable silicon recent studies

As described earlier, the early studies of metastable silicon [2-7,18] probed the possibility of a liquid amorphous transition. More recent work has attempted to find evidence that the transition is one between two liquid phases. In this section, we present a brief discussion of such recent work. 

Recently, RBS has been used to study the metal-silicon reactions induced by both a CW laser and an electron beam (53). Uniform, large area, single phase silicides were formed by adjusting the beam power level to induce a solid state reaction. Under certain conditions metastable mixed-phase systems were also obtained. RBS could non-destructively determine the stoichiometry of the phases formed without additional standards. AES and SIMS have also been used in the study of metal silicides. These applications and other points of interest in the fabrication, characterization and application of metal-semiconductor Schottky barrier junctions have been reviewed recently by Sharma and Gupta (54). 

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