Synthesis and photoluminescence property of silicon carbide nanowires thin film by HF-PECVD system

Abstract

A sample and scalable synthetic strategy was developed for the fabrication of nanocrystalline SiC (nc-SiC) thin film. Thin sheet of nanocrystalline diamond was deposited on Si substrate by hot filament-assisted plasma-enhanced chemical vapour deposition system (HF-PECVD). Further, the resulting carbonbased sheet was heated at 1200 °C to allow a solid state reaction between C and Si substrate to form the SiC thin films. The synthesized films mainly consist of β-SiC nanowires with diameters of about 50 nm and tens of micrometers long. The nanowires axes lie along the [1 1 1] direction and possess a high density of planar defects. The β-SiC nanowires thin films exhibit the strong photoluminescence (PL) peak at a wavelength of 400 nm, which is significantly shifted to the blue compared with the reported PL results of SiC materials. The blue shift may be ascribed to morphology, quantum size confinement effects of the nanomaterials and abundant structure defects that existed in the nanowires.