Doped silicon nanoparticles. A review

Doped silicon nanoparticles combine availability and biocompatibility of the material with a wide variety of functional properties. In this review, the methods of fabrication of doped silicon nanoparticles are discussed, the prevalent of those being chemical vapor deposition, annealing of substoichiometric silicon compounds, and diffusion doping. The data are summarized for the attained impurity contents, in the important case of phosphorus it is shown that impurity, excessive with respect to bulk solubility, is electrically inactive. The patterns of intraparticle impurity distributions are presented, that were studied in the previous decade with highly-informative techniques of atom probe tomography and solid-state NMR. Prospective optical and electrical properties of doped silicon nanoparticles are reviewed, significant role of the position of the impurities is exemplified with plasmonic behavior.