A novel observation of controlled carrier hopping process in B-doped Si nanocrystal/SiC multilayers at low temperatures

doi:10.1088/1674-1056/adf5a6

Abstract Recent advances in quantum computing devices make studies on the carrier transport behaviors of silicon nanocrystals (Si NCs) under cryogenic temperature a most important subject. In this work, we study the electrical properties modified by B dopants in Si NC/SiC multilayers. Mobility measurement shows that the scattering mechanism that dominates in our samples in a low temperature range is ionized impurity scattering. Three carrier transport behaviors are identified as variable range hopping (VRH) (20-100 K), multiple phonon hopping (MPH) (100-500 K) and thermally-activated mechanisms (500-660 K). At temperature ranges as low as 30 K, we observe the effect of the Coulomb gap in B-doped Si NC/SiC multilayers that obey the Efros and Shklovskii (ES) law, which was not present in our previous studies concerning Si NC multilayers. The crossover temperature TC is observed to increase with rising B-doping concentrations, which demonstrates another interesting effect of doping in controlling the electrical properties of Si NCs.

Keywords: Si NCs B dopants Hall mobility variable range hopping

Received: 09 June 2025
Revised: 17 July 2025
Accepted manuscript online: 30 July 2025

PACS:	61.72.uf	(Ge and Si)
	61.82.Rx	(Nanocrystalline materials)
	61.72.U-	(Doping and impurity implantation)
	73.20.Fz	(Weak or Anderson localization)

Fund: This work is supported by Quantum Science and Technology – National Science and Technology Major Project (Grant No. 2024ZD0301100), the National Key R&D Program of China (Grant No. 2018YFB2200101), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61921005 and 62004078).

Corresponding Authors: Jun Xu
E-mail: xjun@ntu.edu.cn,junxu@nju.edu.cn

Cite this article:

Yuhao Wang(王宇皓), Teng Sun(孙腾), Junnan Han(韩俊楠), Jiaming Chen(陈佳明), Ting Zhu(朱挺), Wei Li(李伟), Jun Xu(徐骏), and Kunji Chen(陈坤基) A novel observation of controlled carrier hopping process in B-doped Si nanocrystal/SiC multilayers at low temperatures 2026 Chin. Phys. B 35 036105

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A novel observation of controlled carrier hopping process in B-doped Si nanocrystal/SiC multilayers at low temperatures

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