The fabrication and characterisation of quantum dots, wires and wire net works

The work in this thesis includes two aspects as described below: 1. Freshly produced red, yellow and green emitting porous Si have been fabricated and studied by NEXAFS and EXAFS. The emission peaks are at 690, 580 and 520 nm, which almost covers the fall visible range that direct anodization can achieve. The correlation between the co-ordination numbers of the first, second and third Si neighbour shells from Fourier transform fitting of EXAFS and both emission peak energies and optical bandgaps estimated by PLE (photoluminescence excitation dependence) suggests that the nanostructures of the PS are nanowires, rather than nanoclusters. Two types of quantum nanowire with one and one-plus-a-fraction dimensionality are proposed to interpret the correlation. The order factors of the theoretical fits suggest the nanowires of the freshly produced PS have crystalline cores. 2. Strong and stable blue photoluminescence (PL), visible to the naked eye under 0.4 μW of 300 nm and 2.7 μW of 370 nm excitation, has been observed for samples of Si and C clusters embedded in SiO2 matrices, prepared by rf co-sputtering followed by N2 annealing at 800 deg C. Firstly for the Si clusters. Si K-edge EXAFS and NEXAFS strongly suggest the existence of Si nanoclusters with crystalline cores in the efficient emitting material. On the other hand for the carbon clusters, silicon, carbon and oxygen K-edge XAFS suggest that 1) the nanoclusters present are C-based materials, 2) the luminescent materials probably involves π bonded carbon. The size distributions of both kinds of the nanoclusters obtained by TEM suggest that a quantum-confined size effect can also apply to the blue PL. The strong blue emission is related with the crystallisation of the nanodots by annealing. The PL excitation dependence is explained by an increase in the conduction band density of states deep in the band, and the formation of a band tail. (author)