Thermal and Chemical Stabilities of Hydrogenated Silicon Nanostructures

Thermal and Chemical Stabilities of Hydrogenated Silicon Nanostructures 

As reviewed in Section 10.6, the SiNWs could be etched using HF solution so that the surface oxide sheath is removed and the exposed silicon surface is saturated with hydrogen. The stability of the oxide-removed H-terminated Si wafer surfaces has been investigated and many techniques were invented to suppress its reoxidation upon exposure to humidity. For the case of nanostructured hydrogenated silicon, its chemical stability would be different from the case of the wafer, as has been demonstrated in our recent computational works. One of our predictions, that the hydrogenated SiNWs possess better stability than that of a silicon wafer, could find a number of supportive evidences from our experiments as described above. 

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