Silicon Dioxide Nanostructures Synthesized by DC Reactive Sputtering Technique

Abstract

In this work, silicon dioxide nanostructures were prepared by a reactive closed-field unbalanced magnetron dc plasma sputtering technique. The target of p-type silicon was sputtered in presence of argon-oxygen gas mixture used for plasma generation and oxidation of silicon sputtered atoms. The x-ray diffraction patterns showed that only distinct peak corresponding to the crystal plane of (101) was observed with reasonable intensity. This is typical behavior of nanostructures. The scanning electron microscopy of the prepared samples showed that certain gas mixtures can produce the smallest particles with high probability for large grains to grow. Uniform distributed particles could be obtained using different mixtures. The energy-dispersive x-ray spectroscopy showed that only silicon and oxygen have appeared in the final sample with different weight percentages depending on the mixing ratio of the argon and oxygen gases. The SiO₂ prepared in this work are very good candidates to be employed in random gain media as scattering particles.