A surface extended X-ray absorption fine structure study of tellurium adsorbed onto Si(100)

The adsorption of tellurium on Si(100) has been studied using surface extended X-ray adsorption fine structure (SEXAFS) and X-ray standing wave spectroscopy (XSW). This particular system is of interest due to its potential applicability in the surfactant aided growth of CdHgTeCdTeSi(100) based infra-red detectors. The TeSi(100) structure was generated by depositing a thick layer (∼ 100 Å) of CdTe onto a clean Si (2 × 1) double domain surface, and annealing the sample to 350°C. This resulted is a ∼ 1 ML Te terminated surface where the (2 × 1) reconstruction was lost in favour of a (1 × 1) symmetry. X-ray absorption of the Te L3 edge (E = 4341 eV), with a photon energy range of 4440–4700 eV, was probed using a total yield detection scheme. The SEXAFS results indicated that the Te atoms sat in 2-fold bridge sites directly above a fourth layer Si atom. The corresponding bond length was measured to be 2.52 ± 0.05 Å. The XSW measurements of the (400) reflection gave a coherent position of 1.63 ± 0.03 Å and a coherent fraction of 0.65. This is consistent with the breaking of the SiSi dimers and thus could be an example of the phenomena of adsorbate-induced dereconstruction of the surface. These results are compared with those of Bennet et al. who examined a similar system using soft X-ray photoemission (SXPS) and the STM study of Yoshikawa et al.