On electric conduction of amorphous silicon carbonitride derived from a polymeric precursor

A long-existing problem that the conductivity of amorphous silicon carbonitrides derived from polymeric precursor increases significantly with pyrolysis temperature is investigated. We show that the conductivity exhibited an Arrhenius dependence on pyrolysis temperature, with the activation energy of similar to 3.41 eV. Structural analysis using Raman spectroscopy reveals that the free carbon within the material undergoes a sp(3)-to-sp(2) transition as pyrolysis temperature increases, with the activation energy of similar to 3.6 eV. We conclude that the pyrolysis-temperature induced increase in the conductivity is mainly due to the increase in the conductivity of the free carbon. A simple model is proposed to correlate the two. (C) 2013 AIP Publishing LLC.