A thermodynamic criterion of the crystalline-to-amorphous transition in silicon

Abstract

Abstract It is shown that the crystal lattice expansion of microcrystalline silicon leads, in the limit of small crystallite size of about 30 Å, to an instability of the diamond structure with respect to the amorphous phase. Simple thermodynamic considerations are presented which support the idea of the crystalline-to-amorphous transformation being a discontinuous order—disorder phase transition.