Abstract
We report thermoelectric measurements over a temperature range of 80 K to 300 K of heavily boron-doped nanocrystalline silicon films prepared by hot-wire and plasma-enhanced chemical-vapor depositions. The nanocrystalline silicon films were doped by either gaseous deposition precursors or post-deposition ion implantation, resulting in boron concentrations ranging from 1–2×1020 cm−3 to 3 × 1021 cm−3. Reasonable values of the Seebeck coefficient and electrical conductivity were obtained at 300 K, comparable to many other research work. We also report thermal conductivity measurements on these films before doping, which we use to estimate their prospective thermoelectric efficiency. These measurements show values as low as 0.76 W/mK at 300 K which depend highly upon the grain sizes of the nc-Si films. We find that post-deposition doping by ion-implantation is more effective at enhancing the power factor than gaseous doping, and the power factor is only weakly dependent upon doping concentration for the films doped by ion implantation. We conclude that improvements of the thermoelectric efficiency of nc-Si films may depend more on a reduction of their thermal conductivity than doping optimization. The small grain sizes and the low thermal conductivity of the undoped nc-Si films accomplished in this work are therefore encouraging developments.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
D.M. Rowe, Thermoelectrics Handbook: Macro to Nano (Boca Raton: CRC (Taylor and Francis Group), 2005).
J. He and T.M. Tritt, Science 29, 6358 (2017).
R. Venkatasubramanian, E. Siivola, T. Colpitts, and B. O’Quinn, Nature 413, 597 (2001).
K. Biswas, J. He, I.D. Blum, C.-I. Wu, T.P. Hogan, D.N. Seidman, V.P. Dravid, and M.G. Kanatzidis, Nature 489, 414 (2012).
G. Schierning, H. Wiggers, and R. Schmechel, ECS Trans. 69, 3 (2015).
S. Uma, A.D. McConnell, M. Asheghi, K. Kurabayashi, and K.A. Goodson, Int. J. Thermophys. 22, 605 (2001).
D. Li, Y. Wu, P. Kim, L. Shi, P. Yang, and A. Majumdar, Appl. Phys. Lett. 83, 2934 (2003).
Z. Wang, J. Alaniz, W. Jang, J. Garay, and C. Dames, Nano Lett. 11, 2206 (2011).
D.G. Cahill, H.E. Fisher, T. Klitsner, E.T. Swartz, and R.O. Pohl, J. Vac. Sci. Technol. A 7, 1259 (1989).
B. Jugdersuren, B.T. Kearney, D.R. Queen, T.H. Metcalf, J.C. Culbertson, C.N. Chervin, R.M. Stroud, W. Nemeth, Q. Wang, and X. Liu, Phys. Rev. B 96, 014206 (2017).
N. Neophytou, X. Zianni, H. Kosina, S. Frabboni, B. Lorenzi, and D. Narducci, Nanotechnology 24, 205402 (2013).
V. Kessler, D. Gautam, T. Hülser, M. Spree, R. Theissmann, M. Winterer, H. Wiggers, G. Schierning, and R. Schmechel, Adv. Eng. Mater. 15, 379 (2013).
T. Claudio, N. Stein, D.G. Stroppa, B. Klobes, M. Koza, P. Kudejova, N. Petermann, H. Wiggers, G. Schierning, and R.P. Hermann, Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys. 16, 25701 (2014).
H. Zhou, P. Kropelnicki, and C. Lee, Nanoscale 7, 532 (2015).
J. Loureiro, T. Mateus, S. Filonovich, M. Ferreira, J. Figueira, A. Rodrigues, B.F. Donovan, P.E. Hopkins, and I. Ferreira, Appl. Phys. A 120, 1497 (2015).
K. Valalaki, N. Vouroutzis, and A.G. Nassiopoulou, J. Phys. D Appl. Phys. 49, 315104 (2016).
E. Acosta, N.M. Wight, V. Smirnov, J. Buckman, and N.S. Bennett, J. Electron. Mater. 6, 3077 (2018).
B. Nemeth, D.L. Young, M.R. Page, V. LaSalvia, S. Johnston, R. Reedy, and P. Stradins, J. Mater. Res. 31, 671 (2016).
The Stopping and Range of Ions in Matter. http://www.srim.org/.
B.T. Kearney, B. Jugdersuren, D.R. Queen, T.H. Metcalf, J.C. Culbertson, P.A. Desario, R.M. Stroud, W. Nemeth, Q. Wang, and X. Liu, J. Phys. Condens. Matter 30, 085301 (2018).
D.G. Cahill, M. Katiyar, and J.R. Abelson, Phys. Rev. B 50, 9 (1994).
J.P. Moore and R.S. Graves, J. Appl. Phys. 44, 1174 (1973).
G.U. Sumanasekera, L. Grigorian, and P.C. Eklund, Meas. Sci. Technol. 11, 273 (2000).
N.H. Nickel, P. Lengsfeld, and I. Sieber, Phys. Rev. B 61, 15558 (1999).
R. Basu, S. Bhattacharya, R. Bhatt, M. Roy, S. Ahmad, A. Singh, M. Navaneethan, Y. Hayakawa, D.K. Aswala, and S.K. Gupta, J. Mater. Chem. A 2, 6922 (2014).
L. Pelaz, L.A. Marqués, and J. Barbolla, J. Appl. Phys. 96, 5947 (2004).
M. Takashiri, T. Borca-Tasciuc, A. Jacquot, K. Miyazaki, and G. Chen, J. Appl. Phys. 100, 054315 (2006).
G.J. Snyder and E.S. Toberer, Nat. Mater. 7, 105 (2008).
Y. Lee and G.S. Hwang, Phys. Rev. B 86, 075202 (2012).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Jugdersuren, B., Kearney, B.T., Liu, X. et al. Thermoelectric Properties of Nanocrystalline Silicon Films Prepared by Hot-Wire and Plasma-Enhanced Chemical-Vapor Depositions. J. Electron. Mater. 48, 5218–5225 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11664-019-07262-y
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11664-019-07262-y