Fabrication of FeSi and Fe3Si compounds by electron beam induced mixing of [Fe/Si]2 and [Fe3/Si]2 multilayers grown by focused electron beam induced deposition

TL;DR

This paper presents a method to fabricate FeSi and Fe3Si compounds using focused electron beam induced deposition, involving multilayer structures, electron irradiation, and annealing to induce atomic intermixing.

Contribution

It introduces a novel fabrication process for Fe-Si compounds by combining multilayer deposition with electron irradiation and annealing, enabling synthesis from competing precursor gases.

Findings

Successful fabrication of FeSi and Fe3Si compounds confirmed by TEM

Demonstrated atomic intermixing in multilayer structures via electron irradiation

Method enables nanostructured binary alloy production from selective precursors

Abstract

Fe-Si binary compounds have been fabricated by focused electron beam induced deposition by the alternating use of iron pentacarbonyl, Fe(CO)5, and neopentasilane, Si5H12 as precursor gases. The fabrication procedure consisted in preparing multilayer structures which were treated by low-energy electron irradiation and annealing to induce atomic species intermixing. In this way we are able to fabricate FeSi and Fe3Si binary compounds from [Fe=Si]2 and [Fe3=Si]2 multilayers, as shown by transmission electron microscopy investigations. This fabrication procedure is useful to obtain nanostructured binary alloys from precursors which compete for adsorption sites during growth and, therefore, cannot be used simultaneously.