On the tunability of photoemission and photoabsorption energy of nanosilicon

Structural miniaturization provides us with a new freedom that is indeed fascinating. The new freedom of size not only allows us to tune the physical and chemical properties of a specimen by simply adjusting the shape and size but also enables us to gain information that is beyond the scope of conventional approaches. Here we show that a recent bond order-length-strength (BOLS) correlation could reconcile the size effect on nanosolid silicon with elucidation of information such as the single energy level of an isolated Si atom, the frequency of Si-Si dimer vibration, the upper limit of photoabsorption/ emission, and dielectric suppression.