Silicon nanostructures from electroless electrochemical etching
Kurt W. Kolasinski
Abstract and summary · read the original at the source · none found
In one page
Silicon can be turned into a sponge. Kurt Kolasinski’s review gathers what was then known about doing it the easy way — electroless etching, meaning no battery, no electrodes, no external current, just the right liquid or vapour touching the wafer. Three routes are surveyed: stain etching, metal-assisted etching, and chemical vapour etching. What comes off is a stain film, and the film is not a smooth skin but a porous network of nanometre-scale silicon crystals. That matters here for a reason well outside semiconductor engineering. The leading physical account of ball lightning, proposed by John Abrahamson and James Dinniss and demonstrated on a bench by Gerson Paiva and Antonio Pavão, needs exactly this material: a lightning strike reduces silica in the soil to silicon vapour, the vapour condenses into a fluff of nanoparticles, and the glowing ball is that fluff burning slowly back to oxide. Kolasinski’s review is the chemistry of making the same material without a lightning bolt.
Why it matters hereChapter 9 argues that a long-lived luminous ball is an ordinary object made of extraordinary material, and the silicon route is the version of that argument a laboratory can actually build. Chapter 1 gets the other half: a mechanism climbs the evidence ladder when the material it needs stops being hypothetical and becomes something a chemist can order, etch and characterise on a Tuesday afternoon.
What it claims
01Silicon nanostructures can be made without any external current at all. Kolasinski reviews the advances in producing them from electroless etching, and names the three families of process — stain etching, metal-assisted etching and chemical vapour etching.Abstract, first sentence
Settled physics02The product is nanocrystalline. The stain film that results from etching either polycrystalline or single-crystal silicon is composed of a porous network of nanocrystalline silicon — that is, the etch does not smooth the surface, it builds a structure of crystals at the nanometre scale.Abstract, third sentence
Settled physics03The mechanism was the open part of the subject. Few mechanistic studies of electroless etching had been performed by 2005, and Kolasinski’s move is to borrow: the far more extensively studied anodic etching of silicon in fluoride solutions provides many clues as to how the porous films are formed. What would settle it is the same experimental scrutiny applied to the electroless case directly.Abstract, fourth sentence
What to watch04The film is tunable. Kolasinski reports that control over the properties of the film can be obtained by exercising control over the composition of the etchant — so the size and structure of the silicon nanocrystals produced is a recipe variable, not an accident of the process.Abstract, fifth sentence
Published and peer-reviewed05The field was moving fast when this was written. The review devotes space to what the author calls the explosion in applications of porous silicon over the eighteen months preceding publication, which is why a short review in a Current Opinion journal was the right form for it.Abstract, second sentence
Published and peer-reviewed06This is the supply chain for the silicon ball-lightning route. The Abrahamson and Dinniss mechanism, and the bench experiments Paiva, Pavão and colleagues built on it, require nanometre-scale silicon particles that oxidise slowly enough to glow for seconds rather than milliseconds; the electroless chemistry reviewed here is how that material is produced deliberately, in quantity, and to a specification.Gerson Paiva, Antonio Pavão and colleagues, Production of Ball-Lightning-Like Luminous Balls by Electrical Discharges in Silicon, Physical Review Letters 98, 048501 (2007) — on this site at /library/stm-c5b7cd3f8a — and their energy-density follow-up, Physics-Uspekhi 53, 209 (2010), at /library/stm-e674ef992b
Published and peer-reviewed
Read it · abstract
Abstract
Recent advances in the production of Si nanostructures from electroless etching are reviewed, including stain etching, metal-assisted etching and chemical vapour etching. A brief review of the explosion in applications of porous silicon over the past 18 months is also given. The stain film that results from the etching of (poly- or single-)crystalline Si is composed of a porous network of nanocrystalline silicon. Few mechanistic studies of electroless etching have been performed, but the more extensively studied anodic etching of silicon in fluoride solutions provides many clues as to how porous films are formed. Intriguing recent results have shown that control over the properties of the film can be obtained by exercising control over the composition of the etchant.
Kurt W. Kolasinski. Current Opinion in Solid State and Materials Science 9, pages 73 to 83 (2005). Abstract as deposited by the publisher.
(Abstract only — see the rights note above for why the eleven pages of the review are not reproduced here. They are at the source.)
The silicon line on this site runs through here. The bench demonstration that an arc struck on a silicon wafer throws off ball-lightning-like luminous spheres is at /library/stm-c5b7cd3f8a; the same team’s measurement of how much energy one of those balls carries is at /library/stm-e674ef992b; the survey that places the silicon mechanism among the competing accounts is Bychkov and Nikitin’s at /library/stm-a42e464b5c; the electrostatic bounds any ball-lightning model has to respect are at /library/stm-c3a97e1fe2; and the observational record the whole subject rests on is at /library/stm-48b6e644d4.
The way in
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cossms.2006.03.004PUBLICATION. A review article in Current Opinion in Solid State and Materials Science, volume 9, issues 1 to 2, pages 73 to 83, print date February 2005; the digital object identifier was minted later, which is why the identifier carries 2006. The author is a surface chemist, then at Queen Mary University of London and since at West Chester University of Pennsylvania. LICENCE AND TEXT. Crossref registers only Elsevier’s text-and-data-mining licence for this record, and Unpaywall and OpenAlex both report it closed with no repository copy on 2026-09-08, so no text of the review is reproduced here beyond the author’s own abstract. WHAT WAS READ. The abstract below is the one Elsevier deposited, retrieved on 2026-09-08 from the OpenAIRE publications API for this DOI. The body of the review was not reachable, so the claims below are located to the sentences of that abstract, and the single claim that connects this chemistry to ball lightning is located instead to the two Paiva and Pavão papers already on this site, which were read for their own sheets. CHAPTERS. The skeleton carried no chapters; this is filed to chapter 9, where the silicon route to ball lightning lives, and chapter 1, because a review of how to make the material on a bench is what moves a mechanism up the evidence ladder.
How to cite it
Kurt W. Kolasinski (2005) Silicon nanostructures from electroless electrochemical etching. doi:10.1016/j.cossms.2006.03.004
Where it sits in the curriculum