High pressure crystalline phase formation during nanoindentation: Amorphous versus crystalline silicon

Annealing of nanoindentation-induced high pressure crystalline phases created in crystalline and amorphous silicon

Thermally induced phase transformation of Si-III/Si-XII zones formed by nanoindentation has been studied during low temperature 200 T 300 °C thermal annealing by Raman microspectroscopy and transmission electron microscopy. Two sizes of spherical indenter tips have been used to create substantially different volumes of phase transformed zones in both crystalline c-Si and amorphous silicon a-Si ...

Formation and growth of nanoindentation-induced high pressure phases in crystalline and amorphous silicon

Nanoindentation-induced formation of high pressure crystalline phases Si-III and Si-XII during unloading has been studied by Raman micro-spectroscopy, cross-sectional transmission electron microscopy XTEM , and postindentation electrical measurements. For indentation in crystalline silicon c-Si , rapid unloading 1000 mN/s results in the formation of amorphous silicon a-Si only; a result we have...

Pressure-induced amorphization in the nanoindentation of single crystalline silicon

Large-scale molecular dynamics simulations of nanoindentation on a (100) oriented silicon surface were performed to investigate the mechanical behavior and phase transformation of single crystalline silicon. The direct crystalline-to-amorphous transformation is observed during the nanoindentation with a spherical indenter as long as the applied indentation strain or load is large enough. This a...

Unraveling Crystalline Structure of High-Pressure Phase of Silicon Carbonate

Silicon: the gulf between crystalline and amorphous

It can be said that the history of solid state physics began with the discovery of crystalline order from diffraction studies in the early years of the 20th century. Crystalline order produces X-ray, neutron or electron diffraction patterns with a tremendous amount of information: in an ideal case the data approximates a palisade of Dirac δ-functions. The precisely defined peak locations and in...