Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 March 2011
Most studies of Si nanocrystals ion beam synthesized in SiO2 haveshown that a link exists between the observed physical properties and thecharacteristics of the « populations » of nanoparticles (size-distribution,density, volume fraction). Nevertheless, the direct measurement of theseparameters by Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) is very difficult andpredictive simulations are essential to make the kinetic study complete.This paper presents atomistic simulations aimed at predicting the kineticevolution of the Si nanoparticles during annealing, taking into accounteventual interaction effects. The theoretical results are compared to TEMmeasurements of the size-distributions observed after high temperatureannealing. Experimentally, the growth of these nanoparticles is very slowbut their size significantly increases when increasing the initial Siexcess. Simulations are in agreement with these experimental results onlywhen taking into account possible interactions between neighboring particlesfor initial supersaturations larger than 10 at. %.