Shaping of silicon crystals for channelling experiments through anisotropic chemical etching

Abstract

We present an idea and its development to realize crystals for channelling experiments, which result in significant improvement of the crystal quality with respect to the traditional methods of fabrication. The technique relies on non-conventional usage of the established technique of the anisotropic etching of silicon in micro-machining. Morphological and structural analyses were carried out through electron and scanning-probe microscopy to show that the crystal exhibited flat surfaces with atomically sharp termination, i.e. no appreciable surface damage was induced by the preparation. Thereby, the crystal meets the stringent requirements that are demanded for operation with high-energy beams and in particular for halo collimation in modern hadron colliders.