ИСТИНА

Recent years scientific community attention has been transferred from porous silicon to arrays of Si nanowires (SiNWs) formed by metal-assisted chemical etching (MACE) due to high perfection of its crystal lattice and surface properties. Usually in MACE hydrofluoric acid (HF) was used. But in this work we tried to use green chemistry and HF was changed on NH4F. This procedure made MACE safer and environmentally friendly. Optical properties (total reflectance, interband photoluminescence (PL) and Raman scattering) of SiNWs formed by MACE using green chemistry were investigated. The total reflectance of c-Si is near 30%-40% for the visible spectral range, opposite to SiNWs, which exhibit a strong decrease of the total reflectance. The Raman scattering intensity increases strongly for SiNWs in comparison with the corresponding value of c-Si substrate. Also PL in visible spectral range from SiNW arrays was observed. All these results suggest similar optical properties of SiNWs obtained using green chemistry to the SiNWs obtained by the standard MACE method. It gives an opportunity to obtain high quality SiNWs for various applications in photonics and photovoltaics using green chemistry.