Physics Seminar: Mesoporous Silicon Formation and its use as Template for Organic and Inorganic Materials

Title: Mesoporous Silicon Formation and its use as Template for Organic and Inorganic Materials

Driven both by scientific curiosity and technological applications, mesoporous silicon (PS) have been studied for more than a decades. PS was discovered by A. Uhlir in 1956 while electropolishing crystalline Si in hydrofluoric acid (HF). The PS has since received a lot of attention from both fundamental physics point of view as well as its technological applications in LEDs, sensors, solar cells and filtration or separation of microbeads in biomedical samples. The PS was prepared by electrochemical etching of Si in HF based solution and studied extensively for its optical, physical and morphological properties. The PS further was used as template to study the hexane, a short-range alkane on cooling and heating cycles at different filling fractions using x-ray scattering in reflection geometry. The confinement effect on thermodynamic properties and geometrical arrangement of hexane in mesoporous silicon was studied. The chemical properties of mesoporous silicon as a moderate reducing agent and a nano-structure template for the reductive formation of nano-metal cluster aggregates was used to deposit the metal on and inside the mesoporous silicon using immersion and electroplating methods.
Tea will be served.

You are requested to kindly attend this seminar.