Abstract/Summary

Silylenes (silanediyls) have made an important impact on organosilicon chemistry even if it is of more recent foundation than carbenes in organic chemistry and much less complete. These species are highly reactive intermediates. They play a central role in the chemical vapour deposition (CVD) of various silicon-containing thin films which have a technological importance in microelectronics as well as in the dry etching processes of silicon wafers. Spectroscopic methods have been developed to observe these species, a necessary pre-requisite to their direct monitoring. In this work, deuterated phenylsilane precursor, PhSiD3 was chosen for SiD2 because its analogue phenylsilane, PhSiH3 proved to be a good precursor for SiH2 and the high quality decay signals observed revealed that SiD2 be readily detected from PhSiD3 and that if other decomposition pathways (e.g. PhSiD + D2) are occurring, they do not effect measurements of the rate constants for SiD2. The absorption spectrum of SiD2 formed from the flash photolysis of a mixture of PhSiD3 and SF6 at 193nm were found in the region 17384-17391 cm-1 with strong band at 17387.07 cm-1. This single rotational line of pQ1 was chosen to monitor SiD2 removal. Time-resolved studies of SiD2 have been carried out to obtain rate constants for its bimolecular reactions with D2. The reactions were studied over the pressure range 5-100 Torr (in SF6 bath gas) at four temperatures in the range 298-498K. Single decay from 10 photolysis laser shots were averaged and found to give reasonable first-order kinetics fits. Second order kinetics were obtained by pressure dependence of the pseudo first order decay constants and substance D2 pressures within experimental error. The reaction was found to be weakly pressure dependent at all temperatures, consistent with a third-body mediated association process. In addition, SiH2+ H2 reaction is approximately ca. 60% faster than SiD2+D2 reaction. Theoretical extrapolations (using Lindemann-Hinshelwood model and Rice, Ramsperger, Kassel and Marcus (RRKM) theory) were also carried out and obtained data fitted the Arrhenius equations.