Challenges to extracting spatial information about double P dopants in Si from STM images

Published

August 5, 2024

Author(s)

Garnett W. Bryant, Piotr Rozanski, Michal Zielinski

Abstract

The design and implementation of dopant-based silicon nanoscale devices rely heavily on knowing precisely the locations of phosphorous dopants in their host crystal. One potential solution combines scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) imaging with atomistic tight-binding simulations to reverse-engineer dopant coordinates. This work shows that such an approach may not be straightforwardly extended to double-dopant systems. We find that the ground (quasi-molecular) state of a pair of coupled phosphorous dopants often cannot be fully explained by the linear combination of single-dopant ground states. Although the contributions from excited single-dopant states are relatively small, they can lead to ambiguity in determining individual dopant positions from a multi-dopant STM image. To overcome that, we exploit knowledge about dopant-pair wave functions and propose a simple yet effective scheme for finding double-dopant positions based on STM images.

Citation

Scientific Reports

Volume

14

Pub Type

Journals

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-67903-z

Local Download

Keywords

scanning tunneling microscopy, dopant-based devices, silicon, imaging, spatial metrology

Citation

Bryant, G. , Rozanski, P. and Zielinski, M. (2024), Challenges to extracting spatial information about double P dopants in Si from STM images, Scientific Reports, [online], https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-67903-z, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=957826 (Accessed October 9, 2025)