AVS 52nd International Symposium
    Surface Science Tuesday Sessions
       Session SS-TuP

Paper SS-TuP19
Phonon-Activated Electron-Stimulated Desorption of Halogens from Si(100)-(2x1)

Tuesday, November 1, 2005, 4:00 pm, Room Exhibit Hall C&D

Session: Surface Science Poster Session
Presenter: B.R. Trenhaile, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Authors: B.R. Trenhaile, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
V.N. Antonov, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
G.J. Xu, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
A. Agrawal, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
A.W. Signor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
R.E. Butera, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
K.S. Nakayama, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
J.H. Weaver, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Correspondent: Click to Email
Spontaneous desorption of Cl, Br, and I from n- and p-type Si(100)-(2x1) was studied with scanning tunneling microscopy at temperatures of 620 â?" 825 K where conventional thermal bond breaking should be negligible. The activation energies and prefactors determined from Arrhenius plots indicate a novel reaction pathway that is initiated by the capture of electrons that have been excited by phonon processes into Si-halogen antibonding states. This configuration is on a repulsive potential energy surface, and it is sufficiently long-lived that desorption occurs, as in electron-stimulated-desorption. Surprisingly, the desorption rates for differently doped samples crossed and, above a critical temperature, the reaction with the largest activation energy had the highest rate. This is explained by large entropy changes associated with the multiphonon nature of the electronic excitation. For Cl desorption from p-type Si, these entropy changes amounted to 34 kB. They were 19 kB, 13 kB, and 8 kB for Br desorption from p-type, lightly-doped n-type, and heavily-doped n-type Si, respectively. The desorption rates for I were nearly three orders of magnitude larger than the rates observed for Cl and Br. Here, the Si-I antibonding states overlap the conduction band minimum, and we propose that electrons impinging on the surface with this energy can be captured by the Si-I antibonding states. Together, these results reveal that a complex relationship exists between phonons and electronic excitations during chemical reactions at surfaces.