Charge injection in individual silicon nanoparticles deposited on a conductive substrate
- 23 December 2002
- journal article
- research article
- Published by AIP Publishing in Applied Physics Letters
- Vol. 81 (26) , 5054-5056
- https://doi.org/10.1063/1.1532110
Abstract
We report on charge injection in individual silicon nanoparticles deposited on conductive substrates. Charges are injected using a metal-plated atomic force microscope tip, and detected by electric force microscopy (EFM). Due to the screening efficiency of the conductive substrate, up to ∼200 positive or negative charges can be stored at moderate (<10 V) tip–substrate injection voltage in ∼40 nm high nanoparticles, with discharging time constants of a few minutes. We propose an analytical model in the plane-capacitor approximation to estimate the nanoparticle charge from EFM data. It falls in quantitative agreement with numerical calculations using realistic tip/nanoparticle/substrate geometries.Keywords
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