Silicon Carbide Nanostructures

This book is a comprehensive guide to the latest research on low-dimensional silicon carbide (SiC) nanostructures, including nanoparticles and quantum dots, diverse morphologies of nanowires, nanotubes, 2D honeycomb-structured monolayers, nanostructured films, and nanocomposites based on both sound experiments and ab initio calculations and simulations. It also covers the significant advances made in the past several decades in the structural, electronic, and optical properties of various polytypes of bulk SiC crystals as well as fruitful photonic applications of SiC. SiC nanostructures exhibit fascinating and industrially important properties, including diverse and transformable polytypes, complex and intriguing surface structures including fruitful surface color centers across the entire visible spectral region, and excellent biocompatibility. These properties make them ideal for use in nanoelectronics, photonics, electron field emission, sensing, quantum information, green energy conversion and storage, composite nanostructures, biomedical engineering, and medicine. SiC is also an excellent template for epitaxially growing high-quality graphene and other semiconductors.  This second edition of the book is significantly expanded and updated to reflect those newest advances as well as some important correlated points missed in the first edition, emphasizing the strong correlations between structures and properties. Newly incorporated and highly expanded topics include point defects and spin dynamics, impurities and luminescence, origins of presolar SiC grains, unique characteristics of SiC quantum dots, applications of SiC nanowires in microwave absorption and thermal management, two-dimensional SiC honeycomb-structured monolayers, etc. It is an essential and self-contained reference for materials scientists, physicists, chemists, and engineers working in microelectronics, optoelectronics, microengineering, and biomedical engineering. Graduate students and researchers new to the field will also find this book a valuable resource.