Phase Transformation and Ion Beam Induced Crystallization in SiC Layers Formed by Mevva Implantation of Carbon into Silicon

Buried SiC layers were synthesized by carbon implantation into silicon with a metal vapor vacuum arc ion source under various implantation and annealing conditions. The infrared absorption spectra of these samples were deconvoluted into two or three gaussian components depending on the preparation conditions. One component peaked at around 700 cm-1was assigned to amorphous SiC (a-SiC). The other two components, both peaked at 795 cm-1 but with different values of full width at half maximum (FWHM), were attributed to β-SiC. The one with a larger (smaller) FWHM corresponds to β-SiC of smaller (larger) grains. With this deconvolution scheme, the fraction of various SiC phases in these samples were determined. It was found that for the as-implanted samples there are critical energies and doses at which the crystalline SiC fraction increases abruptly. This was attributed to the ion beam induced crystallization (IBIC) effect. It was also shown that the IBIC effect leads to strong dependence of the β-SiC fraction on the order of implantation for samples synthesized by double-energy implantation. Analysis of the evolution of the β-SiC fraction with annealing time indicated that the crystallization process in these SiC layers could well be described by the classical random nucleation and growth theory.