In Situ TEM Near-Field Optical Probing of Nanoscale Silicon Crystallization
- 17 April 2012
- journal article
- letter
- Published by American Chemical Society (ACS) in Nano Letters
- Vol. 12 (5), 2524-2529
- https://doi.org/10.1021/nl3007352
Abstract
Laser-based processing enables a wide variety of device configurations comprising thin films and nanostructures on sensitive, flexible substrates that are not possible with more traditional thermal annealing schemes. In near-field optical probing, only small regions of a sample are illuminated by the laser beam at any given time. Here we report a new technique that couples the optical near-field of the laser illumination into a transmission electron microscope (TEM) for real-time observations of the laser-materials interactions. We apply this technique to observe the transformation of an amorphous confined Si volume to a single crystal of Si using laser melting. By confinement of the material volume to nanometric dimensions, the entire amorphous precursor is within the laser spot size and transformed into a single crystal. This observation provides a path for laser processing of single-crystal seeds from amorphous precursors, a potentially transformative technique for the fabrication of solar cells and other nanoelectronic devices.Keywords
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