Jn. Chazalviel et al., ROLE OF DIELECTRIC EFFECTS IN THE RED-GREEN SWITCHING OF POROUS SILICON LUMINESCENCE, Journal de physique. I, 4(9), 1994, pp. 1325-1339
Trapping of a carrier at an ionized impurity in porous silicon may be
significantly hindered when the material is embedded in a high-dielect
ric-constant medium such as an aqueous electrolyte. This effect is est
imated for a geometry of cylindrical silicon wires, and by modeling th
e two media with wavevector-independent dielectric constants. The self
-image potential of the electron is taken into account, and the freque
ncy dependence of the outer dielectric constant is treated in a simple
manner. The results demonstrate that the impurity states are not acce
ssible in the presence of the electrolyte, just due to the dielectric
relaxation of the embedding medium. This result may apply to different
kinds of localized electronic states, including those responsible for
the red luminescence in dry porous silicon. This provides a plausible
explanation for the red to green switching of the luminescence when t
he porous silicon is wet and suggests that using embedding media of in
termediate dielectric constants should allow one to observe a progress
ive transition between red and green luminescence. Observation of poro
us silicon luminescence in solvents of various dielectric constants pr
ovides a preliminary test of this prediction.