Steels containing sufficient concentrations of silicon tend to form a low melting temperature oxide called fayalite, which then penetrates both the steel and any other oxide to form a mechanical key. As a consequence, routine descaling operations fail to remove all traces of FeO that remain attached to the final product and oxidise to form a red oxide blemish on the surface. The formation of ox...

This study analyses the in uence of the argon ow on the Plasma Enhanced Chemical Vapor Deposition (PECVD) of silicon oxide thin lms by using TEOS as silicon source. The argon ow increases the deposition rate, however it also can creates some defects in the deposited lm. Several characterization techniques were used to analyze the deposited lms. The presence of argon, in the gas phase, modi es t...

To assess the formation of intra-island grain boundaries during the early stages of pentacene film growth, we studied sub-monolayers of pentacene on pristine silicon oxide and silicon oxide with high pinning centre density (induced by UV/O(3) treatment). We investigated the influence of the kinetic energy of the impinging molecules on the sub-monolayer growth by comparing organic molecular beam...

ABSTRACT The effect of silicon oxide surface segregation on the locally-resolved kinetics of the CO oxidation reaction on individual grains of a polycrystalline Pd foil was studied in situ by PEEM, MS and XPS. The silicon oxide formation induced by Si-impurity segregation at oxidizing conditions, was monitored by XPS and its impact on the global and local (spatially resolved) kinetics of the CO...

The chainlike silicon nanowires SiNWs have been synthesized by fluctuating the pressure of the carrier gas in the growth process. The chainlike SiNWs comprise crystalline Si nanoparticles interconnected by amorphous silicon oxide wires. In addition to the sphere, other interesting shapes such as rectangular and triangular Si nanoparticles in chainlike SiNWs were also observed. X-ray absorption ...

Growth of thinner gate oxides and their thickness control is one of many challenges in scaling technologies today. Nitrogen implantation can be used to control gate oxide thicknesses. This article reports a study on the fundamental behavior of nitrogen diffusion in silicon. Nitrogen was implanted as N2 1 at a dose of 5310 ions/cm at 40 and 200 keV through a 50 Å screen oxide into Czochralski si...

We report on mechanical dissipation measurements carried out on thin (∼100 nm), single-crystal silicon cantilevers with varying chemical surface termination. We find that the 1-2 nm-thick native oxide layer of silicon contributes about 85% to the friction of the mechanical resonance. We show that the mechanical friction is proportional to the thickness of the oxide layer and that it crucially d...

Porous nanocrystalline silicon (pnc-Si) membranes are a new class of membrane material with promising applications in biological separations. Pores are formed in a silicon film sandwiched between nm thick silicon dioxide layers during rapid thermal annealing. Controlling pore size is critical in the size-dependent separation applications. In this work, we systematically studied the influence of...

Fundamental understanding of tribochemical wear mechanism of oxide-free single crystalline silicon (without native oxide layer) is essential to optimize the process of ultra-precision surface manufacturing. Here, we report sliding speed-dependent nanowear of oxide-free silicon against SiO2 microspheres in air and in deionized water. When contact pressure is too low to induce Si yield, tribochem...