# Thermometry of Silicon Nanoparticles

## TL;DR

This study demonstrates that silicon nanoparticles can serve as high-resolution nanothermometers by measuring their volume plasmon energy, providing a promising method for temperature mapping in nanoscale devices.

## Contribution

The paper introduces a novel method for nanoscale temperature measurement using silicon nanoparticles' volume plasmon energy in STEM-EELS.

## Key findings

- Plasmon energy varies predictably with temperature in silicon nanoparticles.
- Measured nanoparticle temperatures agree within 5% of macroscopic chip thermometers.
- Silicon nanoparticles can act as in situ nanothermometers in electron microscopy.

## Abstract

Current thermometry techniques lack the spatial resolution required to see the temperature gradients in typical, highly-scaled modern transistors. As a step toward addressing this problem, we have measured the temperature dependence of the volume plasmon energy in silicon nanoparticles from room temperature to 1250$^\circ$C, using a chip-style heating sample holder in a scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM) equipped with electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS). The plasmon energy changes as expected for an electron gas subject to the thermal expansion of silicon. Reversing this reasoning, we find that measurements of the plasmon energy provide an independent measure of the nanoparticle temperature consistent with that of the heater chip's macroscopic heater/thermometer to within the 5\% accuracy of the chip thermometer's calibration. Thus silicon has the potential to provide its own, high-spatial-resolution thermometric readout signal via measurements of its volume plasmon energy. Furthermore, nanoparticles in general can serve as convenient nanothermometers for \emph{in situ} electron microscopy experiments.