Nanoscale tensile strain in perfect silicon crystals studied by high-resolution X-ray diffraction

Abstract

A device was designed, built, and tested to apply small tensile strain to perfect single silicon crystals. It was used on the second axis of a double crystal diffractometer to obtain controllable strain fields. The strain field quality was evaluated by double crystal X-ray diffractometry. The dependence of atomic plane distances on applied stress was determined. Stress-strain curves were obtained from fitted rocking curves in the Bragg-Bragg and Bragg-Laue configurations. These results show that it is possible to obtain a tensile strained lattice with quality suitable for X-ray optics.