2026-10-09T21:54:34Z https://api.figshare.com/v2/oai

oai:figshare.com:article/33801955 2026-09-15T15:10:25Z portal_1197 item_type_3 month_year_09_2026

Data for Sub-2 cm/s passivation of silicon surfaces by aprotic solutions Alex I. Pointon (6877133) Nicholas E. Grant (6877136) Sophie Pain (23223889) Joshua T. White (11993783) John D. Murphy (6877151) Silicon -- Surfaces Surface chemistry Semiconductors -- Surfaces Surfaces (Physics) Migrated from ePrints Minimizing recombination at semiconductor surfaces is required for the accurate determination of the bulk carrier lifetime. Proton donors, such as hydrofluoric acid and superacids, are well known to provide highly effective short-term surface passivation. We demonstrate here that aprotic solutions based on bis(trifluoromethanesulfonyl)methane (TFSM) in hexane or pentane can also result in excellent passivation of (100)-orientation silicon surfaces. We show that the optimized TFSM-pentane passivation scheme can measure effective lifetimes up to 20 ms, with a surface recombination velocity of 1.7 cm s^-1 at an excess carrier density of 10^15 cm^-3. Fitting injection-dependent lifetime curves requires chemical passivation and field effect passivation from a negatively charged layer with a charge density of 10^10 –10^11 q cm^-2. The slightly higher recombination velocity of 2.3 cm s^-1 measured with TFSM-hexane can be explained by a lower charge density in the passivating layer, suggesting that the steric hindrance associated with the solvent size could play a role in the passivation mechanism. Finally, phosphorus nuclear magnetic resonance experiments confirm that TFSM-based solutions have Lewis acidity without being superacids, which opens up opportunities for them to be used in materials systems sensitive to superacidic environments.<br><br>The dataset (a single file in XLSX format) contains the data behind the figures in the paper. Captions to the figures are given in the paper. Abbreviations, variables and methods used are defined in the paper. 2020-03-16T00:00:00Z Dataset Dataset 10.82444/warw.33801955.v1 https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/Data_for_Sub-2_cm_s_passivation_of_silicon_surfaces_by_aprotic_solutions/33801955 CC BY 4.0