The cavity ringdown technique has been employed for the spectroscopic characterization of the AuSi molecule, which is generated in a pulsed supersonic laser vaporization plasma reactor. Fifteen rovibronic bands have been measured between 340 nm–390 nm, 8 of which have been analyzed to yield molecular properties for the X and D S states of AuSi. This assignment is in disagreement with previous e...

Interest in the use of EPMA at low voltage has grown considerably in recent years, mainly because of the availability of electron-beam instruments equipped with field-emission guns. However, EPMA at low voltage is marred by both experimental and analytical problems which may affect the accuracy of quantitative results. In the case of the analysis of transition elements, both the emission and ab...

One crucial challenge for the integrated circuit devices to go beyond the current technology has been to find the appropriate contact and interconnect materials. NiSi has been commonly used in the 45 nm devices mainly because it possesses the lowest resistivity among all metal silicides. However, for devices of even smaller dimension, its stability at processing temperature is in doubt. In this...

Integrating epitaxial and ferromagnetic Europium Oxide (EuO) directly on silicon is a perfect route to enrich silicon nanotechnology with spin filter functionality. To date, the inherent chemical reactivity between EuO and Si has prevented a heteroepitaxial integration without significant contaminations of the interface with Eu silicides and Si oxides. We present a solution to this long-standin...

The unique electronic and mechanical properties of metal silicide films render them interesting for advanced materials in plasmonic devices, batteries, field-emitters, thermoelectric devices, transistors, and nanoelectromechanical switches. However, enabling their use requires precisely controlling their electronic structure. Using platinum silicide (PtxSi) as a model silicide, we demonstrate t...

Materials research plays a vital role in transforming breakthrough scientific ideas into next-generation technology. Similar to the way silicon revolutionized the microelectronics industry, the proper materials can greatly impact the field of plasmonics and metamaterials. Currently, research in plasmonics and metamaterials lacks good material building blocks in order to realize useful devices. ...

The cavity ringdown technique has been implemented for electronic spectroscopy of jet-cooled CuSi produced in a pulsed UV laser vaporization plasma reactor. A time-of-flight mass spectrometer is used to simultaneously monitor species produced in the supersonic expansion and allows correlation studies to be performed. Seven rotationally resolved vibronic bands have been measured near 400 nm, yie...

Full silicidation ~FUSI! of polysilicon gates promises to be a simple approach for formation of metal gate electrodes for highly scaled complementary metal oxide semiconductor ~CMOS! transistors. Devices have been reported with several different silicides, prominently with nickel. NiSi was shown to produce different work functions, covering a large portion of silicon bandgap, in relation to a d...

The growth of iron silicides on Si (111) using reactive deposition epitaxy method was studied by scanning tunneling microscopy and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). Instead of the mixture of different silicide phases, a homogeneous crystalline film of c (4 × 8) phase was formed on the Si (111) surface at approximately 750°C. Scanning tunneling spectra show that the film exhibits a semicon...