Abstract
We report about the contribution of thermally grown SiOx overlayer on the SiOx/Si interface (with oxidation states Sin+, where n = 1, 2, 3, 4) to the optical losses of a resonant spectroscopic cavity. The experiments on Si oxide thin films were performed in evanescent wave for Si samples in contact with a total internal reflection surface of a BK7 prism. The evanescent field can be exploited to investigate properties and processes such as the absorption of thin film or solid/air interface reactions. The results show that the oxide overlayer thickness grows with the thermal exposure time and is limited after more than 7 h of treatment. Transmission electron microscopy has been used for the native oxide thickness measurement and angle-resolved X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy used to determine the thermal oxide thickness. A change of absorption coefficient Δα in the range 100–200 cm−1 is obtained by evanescent-wave cavity ring-down spectroscopy (EW-CRDS) for thermal silicon oxide overlayer, in agreement with the general trend from literature. The evaluation from the EW-CRDS experiments presents the used setup as a competitive method for measuring the absorption properties of thin overlayer.
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This work was partly supported by Core Program 2013 under the Ministry of Education, Research, Youth and Sports, Romania.
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Cotirlan-Simioniuc, C., Ghita, R.V., Negrila, C.C. et al. The evanescent-wave cavity ring-down spectroscopy technique applied to the investigation of thermally grown oxides on Si(100). Appl. Phys. A 117, 1359–1365 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00339-014-8556-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00339-014-8556-3