Determination of the energetic resolution of Schottky barrier visualization via interface band structure and parallel momentum conservation

The energetic resolution of Schottky barrier visualization is determined by utilizing differences in interface band structures between the Au/Si(001) and Au/Si(111) non-epitaxial interfaces and parallel momentum conservation of the carriers. The visualization technique is based on ballistic electron emission microscopy and spectroscopy, where tens of thousands of spectra are collected on a grid and then fit to extract a spatially resolved map and histogram of the electrostatic barrier height. A resolution of 10 meV is determined from the minimal splitting and eventual merging of the histograms as the gold thickness decreases for the Au/Si(001) and Au/Si(111) samples. This splitting is below previously measured differences in barrier heights extracted from computational modeling of measured barrier height distributions from other interfaces.