Helium Ion-Assisted Wet Etching of Silicon Carbide with Extremely Low Roughness for High-Quality Nanofabrication

Silicon carbide (SiC) is a promising material for a wide range of applications, including mechanical nano-resonators, quantum photonics, and non-linear photonics. However, its chemical inertness poses challenges for etching in terms of resolution and smoothness. Herein, a novel approach known as helium ion-bombardment-enhanced etching (HIBEE) is presented to achieve high-quality SiC etching. The HIBEE technique utilizes a focused helium ion beam with a typical ion energy of 30 keV to disrupt the crystal lattices of SiC, thus enabling wet etching using hydrofluoric acids and hydrogen peroxide. The etching mechanism is verified via simulations and characterization. The use of a sub-nanometer beam spot of focused helium ions ensures fabrication resolution, and the resulting etched surface exhibits an extremely low roughness of ≈0.9 nm. One of the advantages of the HIBEE technique is that it does not require resist spin-coating and development processes, thus enabling the production of nanostructures on irregular SiC surfaces, such as suspended structures and sidewalls. Additionally, the unique interaction volume of helium ions with substrates enables the one-step fabrication of suspended nanobeam structures directly from bulk substrates. The HIBEE technique is expected to facilitate and accelerate the prototyping of high-quality SiC devices.