Single-Atom Control of Arsenic Incorporation in Silicon for High-Yield Artificial Lattice Fabrication.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 38380859.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1002/adma.202312282 and PMC identifier 11475292.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Artificial lattices constructed from individual dopant atoms within a semiconductor crystal hold promise to provide novel materials with tailored electronic, magnetic, and optical properties. These custom-engineered lattices are anticipated to enable new, fundamental discoveries in condensed matter physics and lead to the creation of new semiconductor technologies including analog quantum simulators and universal solid-state quantum computers. This work reports precise and repeatable, substitutional incorporation of single arsenic atoms into a silicon lattice. A combination of scanning tunneling microscopy hydrogen resist lithography and a detailed statistical exploration of the chemistry of arsine on the hydrogen-terminated silicon (001) surface are employed to show that single arsenic dopants can be deterministically placed within four silicon lattice sites and incorporated with 97 ± 2% yield. These findings bring closer to the ultimate frontier in semiconductor technology: the deterministic assembly of atomically precise dopant and qubit arrays at arbitrarily large scales.