Microscopic observation of lateral and vertical charge transportation in Si nanocrystals sandwiched by amorphous SiC layers

Charge injection and transportation process is a fundamental problem to Si nanocrystals (Si-ncs) based electric and photonic devices. In the manuscript, a single layer of Si-ncs sandwiched by amorphous Si carbide (a-SiC) was prepared by excimer laser annealing of a-SiC/a-Si/a-SiC multilayers, and the charging effect was then characterized by Kelvin probe force microscopy (KPFM) on the microscopic scale. Opposite charges were injected into Si-ncs through the biased tip and formed a core-ring or up-down shaped distribution. The decay characteristics showed that these opposite charges would not only vertically tunnel through the bottom a-SiC layer to substrate but also laterally transport and recombine with each other driven by the attractive Coulomb force. Besides, the charge retention time was also found dependent on the injection biases, which is tentatively ascribed to the charge trapping by the Si-ncs/a-SiC interface states under high bias scanning. The analysis was further supported by conductive atomic force microscopy (CAFM) measurement, in which the current-voltage curves gradually shifted during the repetition test, probably because of bias screening by the trapped charges at these interface states.