Soft-Chemistry–Based Routes to Epitaxial α-Quartz Thin Films with Tunable Textures

Abstract

Fabricating Quartz Quartz is used industrially as an abrasive, as an inert glassy material, or for high-quality crystals in microelectronics. It is also valued for its piezoelectronic properties. However, it is hard to grow quartz as a patterned material or to integrate it into nanostructured devices. Carretero-Genevrier et al. (p. 827 ; see the Perspective by Brinker and Clem ) have developed a method for preparing oriented epitaxial thin films of polycrystalline α-quartz on single-crystal silicon substrates using ambient pressure and temperatures below 1000°C. Different processing conditions can be used to fabricate quartz films with a variety of pore sizes or as a dense nonporous α-quartz film.