Observing the effect of water vapor on post-irradiated surface morphology of SiO2 and Si3N4 insulators by atomic force microscopy

In this work, we investigated the effect of water-vapor treatment on the surface morphology of SiO2 and Si3N4 insulators before and after Co60 gamma-ray irradiation by using the atomic force microscopy (AFM) operated under non-contact mode. Before irradiation, no apparent surface morphology change was found in SiO2 samples even they were water vapor treated. However, bright spots were found on post-irradiated water-vapor-treated SiO2 sample surfaces but not on those without water-vapor treatment. We attributed the bright spots to the negative charge accumulation in the oxide due to charge balancing between hydroxyl (OH−) ions adsorbed on SiO2 surface and electron–hole pairs (ehps) generated during irradiation since they can be annealed out after low temperature annealing process. On the contrary, no bright spots were observed on post-irradiated Si3N4 samples with and without water-vapor treatment. This result confirms that Si3N4 is a better water-resist passivation layer than SiO2 layer.