Laser ablation of porous silicon as a function of laser wavelength and width of silicon nanowires was studied in our experiments. The time-resolved evolution of the cloud of the porous silicon particles produced by laser ablation is studied in situ by the analysis of the kinetics of photoluminescence signal. The laser ablation of porous silicon produced by pulses of 532 nm or 337 nm radiation with addition of synchronized power pulses of 1064 nm radiation. The cloud of the nanometer-sized silicon crystallites had the high enhancement of luminescence quantum efficiency in the red region of spectra. The slow PL kinetics component, which is due to the localized carriers, decays on a millisecond time scale. The squeezed electron-hole plasma heating by IR-laser radiation may produce a damage of silicon nanowires. The fragments of nanowires in cloud must be smaller, than the critical length. The energy of excitation of e-h pair in fragment with contribution of longitude quantum modes must be lower than energy of the excited photons. Particles with lesser length don't absorb excited laser radiation and don't damage. For this case we may speak about the quantum mechanism of laser ablation of nanowires.

Date Published: 15 July 2004
PDF: 6 pages
Proc. SPIE 5506, Nonresonant Laser-Matter Interaction (NLMI-11), (15 July 2004); doi: 10.1117/12.580015

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 5506:
Nonresonant Laser-Matter Interaction (NLMI-11)
Mikhail N. Libenson, Editor(s)