Hydrogen interaction with clean and modified silicon surfaces

The present report deals with the main aspects of the interaction of hydrogen with the atomically clean crystalline silicon surfaces and submonolayer metal/silicon interfaces. After a brief presentation of the experimental techniques applied nowadays in the hydrogen/silicon interaction studies, the main recent results obtained in this field are reviewed. For the case of clean silicon surfaces, hydrogen interaction is shown to change greatly their structure and properties. The main regularities of the hydrogenation of silicon and the features of the processes on the hydrogen-adsorbed silicon surfaces (chemical reactions, metal film growth, silicon and germanium epitaxy) are discussed. The atomic hydrogen interaction with the metal/silicon submonolayer interfaces results in most cases in the agglomeration of the two-dimensional metal layers into the three-dimensional metal islands. The application of this process for the structural investigations is demonstrated. The feasibility of the selective deposition and extraction of H atoms by a tip of scanning tunneling microscope is shown to open wide opportunities for nanostructure fabrication. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.