In-situ pretreatment approach for surface deterioration alleviation amidst thermal desorption of Si(100)

Within this article, a novel in-situ method is proposed as a modification of thermal desorption utilizing pretreatment which can be applied to systems subject to material deposition, substrate heating, and creation of non-oxidizing environments (vacuum or inert atmosphere). Following the theoretical development of this proposed method, involving the fue ling of the oxide-reduction reaction with segregated sacrificial material, the method is demonstrated experimentally on Si (100) wafers utilizing ex-situ atomic force microscopy for resulting surface topography analysis and in-situ reflective high-energy electron diffraction for crystalline information during the modified thermal desorption progression.