Morphological and optical properties of soft-landed supported nanoclusters: Effect of rapid thermal annealing

We report the formation of large islands of bi-modal lateral size distributions having one peak at lateral size ∼100 nm (height ∼70 nm) and another at ∼160 nm (height ∼110 nm) by soft-landing of size-selected copper nanoclusters (3 nm in diameter) at room temperature (26 °C). Si(100) wafer containing native oxide is used as substrate. Transmission electron microscopy (TEM), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM) are employed to study the morphological aspects and for optical aspect cathodoluminescence measurement is used. Rapid thermal annealing (RTA) (200 °C, dry N, 120 s) induced effects on the morphology shows that individual islands are morphologically stable. A careful qualitative study of the optical property using cathodoluminescence in a SEM before and after the thermal treatment, using RTA, reveals very low diffusion of the cluster material into the substrate. © 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.