Li et al. Nanoscale Research Letters 2011, 6:601 http://www.nanoscalereslett.com/content/6/1/601 N A N O E X P R E S S Open Access Characterization of ultrathin InSb nanocrystals film deposited on SiO /Si substrate 2 Dengyue Li, Hongtao Li*, Hehui Sun and Liancheng Zhao Abstract Recently, solid-phase recrystallization of ultrathin indium antimonide nanocrystals (InSb NCs (films grown on SiO2/Si substrate is very attractive, because of the rapid development of thermal annealing technique. In this study, the recrystallization behavior of 35 nm indium antimonide film was studied. Through X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis, it is demonstrated that the InSb film is composed of nanocrystals after high temperature rapid thermal annealing. Scanning electron microscopy shows that the film has a smooth surface and is composed of tightly packed spherical grains, the average grain size is about 12.3 nm according to XRD results. The optical bandgap of the InSb NCs film analyzed by Fourier Transform infrared spectroscopy measurement is around 0.26 eV. According to the current-voltage characteristics of the InSb NCs/SiO2/p-Si heterojunction, the film has the rectifying behavior and the turn-on voltage value is near 1 V. Introduction Moore’s law has predicted that the number of transis- tors, which are placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit, doubles approximately every 2 years. This trend is expected to be maintained until at least 2020. Nowa- days, 65-nm technology node of the most advanced microprocessors in production has transistor gate lengths of 35 nm, which is looking forward to be 22 nm in 2016 [1,2]. However, the inherent scaling limitations of electron devices bring many technical challenges from traditional work mode, i.e., material and basic device physics; therefore, researchers should promptly overcome or improve some of these challenges with var- ious research breakthroughs. Ultrathin III-V compound semiconductor film growth on Si-based substrate has attracted significant attention because of the combina- tion of the high mobility of III-V semiconductors and the well established, low-cost processing of Si technol- ogy. Paralleling with silicon-on-insulator technology, XOI was used to represent compound semiconductor- on-insulator platform [3-6]. Semiconductor NCs provide size-tunable optical and electrical properties, based on quantum confinement of charge carriers within them, high surface-to-volume ratios, and other attributes that have led to the development of a new generation of * Correspondence: llhhtt@hit.edu.cn Department of Information Materials Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150001, P. R. China materials and devices [7-10]. Because of their various unique properties, there has been considerable interest in the synthesis of high-quality III-V compound NCs [11,12]. InSb has the smallest effective mass, the narrow- est bandgap, and the highest intrinsic electron mobility of III-V semiconductors. In this article, InSb NCs film is grown on SiO2/Si (111) substrate using solid-phase recrystallization by rapid thermal annealing. The remainder of this article is organized as follows. At beginning, it describes the detailed deposition process of 35 nm InSb NCs film on SiO2/Si (111) substrate. Following the morphology, structures, optical, and electrical properties of the InSb NCs layer on SiO2/Si are presented. Finally, it provides that the NCs film has an average grain size of 12.3 nm, and the optical bandgap of InSb NCs film is about 0.26 eV. Experiment InSb film has been deposited on SiO2/Si (111) substrate at room temperature by radio frequency (r.f.) magnetron sputtering using InSb alloy target. The native SiO2 layer on silicon, which was about 40 Å in thickness, was not removed prior to film growth. The base pressure is 10-6 Pa to ensure a low level of impurities. The growing con- ditions are 55 W r.f. power, 0.6 Pa Ar pressure to ensure good crystallographic properties. The deposition experiments show that when a stoichiometric © 2011 Li et al; licensee Springer. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.