Engineering Pseudosubstrates with Porous Silicon Technology

In this work, we use a controlled oxidation of a mesoporous silicon substrate as a tool for extending and adjusting the Si lattice parameter to other materials such as SixGe1-x. Our approach involves four steps. First, a seed film is epitaxially grown on a single-crystal Si(100) wafer by Molecular Beam Epitaxy(MBE). Second, porosification is performed according to a standard electrochemical etching procedure but using a “two wafers technique”. Third, the porous part of the sample is oxidized at mild temperatures (300–500°C) in a dry O2 atmosphere, inducing a substantial in-plane expansion of the seed film. Fourth, an overgrowth by MBE of an epilayer is done to test the thus-obtained pseudosubstrate. The challenging task in this last step is to deoxidize the seed film surface at ~900°C without losing the strain induced by oxidation of the porous part of the sample.

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