Radiation-induced bending of silicon-on-insulator nanowires probed by coherent x-ray diffractive imaging

Coherent x-ray diffractive imaging (CXDI) is a powerful technique to study the bending of silicon-on-insulator nanowires. Radiation-induced bending causes the nanowires to exhibit highly distorted diffraction patterns in reciprocal space, from which a strain distribution is inferred. To confirm this, we simulate diffraction patterns using finite-element-analysis (FEA) calculations, which show excellent agreement with the experimental measurements. Our findings provide details of how silicon-on-insulator MOSFET devices might become strained during radiation damage of the underlying oxide.