Doped Silicon Nanoparticles. A Review

Abstract

Doped silicon nanoparticles combine material availability and biocompatibility with a wide variety of functional properties. The review focuses on the methods of fabrication of doped silicon nanoparticles, the prevalent of those being chemical vapor deposition, annealing of substoichiometric silicon compounds, and diffusion doping. Data on the achieved doping levels have been summarized. For the important case of phosphorus, it has been shown that an impurity excessive relative to its solubility in silicon crystals is electrically inactive. The patterns of intraparticle dopant distributions studied in the last decade using powerful techniques of atom probe tomography and solid-state NMR are presented. The promising optical and electrophysical properties of doped silicon nanoparticles are considered, and the significant role of the position of dopants in the design of a material with the desired properties is exemplified by plasmonic behavior.