Historical research guide · 1000 · 2005

Silicon nanostructures from electroless electrochemical etching

Kurt W. Kolasinski

In one minute

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.

Connection

Chapter 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.

From the source

Silicon 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
The 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
The 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
The 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
The 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
This 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

The way in

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cossms.2006.03.004

Historical source-access record. This guide links to the original; it does not reproduce the paper text.

PUBLICATION. 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

Plasmoids, charge clusters and the orbs