Characterization of asymmetric fragmentation patterns in SFM images of porous silicon

Due to possible technological applications in opto-electronic devices, the interest in characterizing porous silicon structure patterns has recently increased. From scanning force microscopy (SFM) we have obtained images of different samples of porous silicon and applied pattern characterization operators on these matrices. In this paper, asymmetric spatial fragmentation in amplitude envelopes of porous silicon samples are characterized by means of a parameter that quantifies the amount of spatial asymmetry in the gradient field. The results show that this method is well suited to characterize silicon porosity quantitatively.