Hydrogen diffusion into the bulk at nearly ideal H-terminated region on Si[100] surfaces

Hydrogen terminated Si surfaces have attracted strong interest not only from the viewpoint of application to semiconductor device fabrication, but also for their importance as a model system for surface science phenomena. In spite of the large number of reported works on the H-termination, there are still many unascertained details. One of the important topics is the hydrogen diffusion into the subsurface, which possibly causes the etching of the surface. As subsurface hydrogen cannot be detected by IRRAS directly, this topic has in the past been not addressed by surface vibration analysis. In this work, the dependence of the infrared reflection absorption spectroscopy (IRRAS) using buried metal layer substrate spectra on the substrate temperatures and hydrogen exposures have been measured for H-terminated Si [100]-(2/spl times/1) surfaces. We find that the linewidth change depends significantly on the adsorption temperature (T/sub x/) and hydrogen exposure.