Abstract

Most work on luminescent silicon has focused on porous silicon and silicon nanocrystals, in which carriers are effectively confined in all three spatial dimensions. The leading models accounting for the observed visible photoluminescence from these structures rely on quantum confinement shifts in the energy of electronic states in the nanoscale silicon structures,¹ on radiative recombination at localized states at the surface of the silicon structures/ or both. Both these mechanisms should operate as well in thin silicon layers.

© 1996 Optical Society of America