Light scattering study of boron nitride microcrystals

Raman scattering and x-ray diffraction measurements are used to correlate finite-size effects on the Raman spectra of nonpolar vibrational modes in BN. The BN microcrystalline samples used exhibited domain sizes varying from 4.4 to 78.5 nm in the plane and 1.5 and 47.5 nm perpendicular to the planes. The Raman measurements indicated that the high-frequency ${E}_{2g}$ mode shifted to higher frequency and broadened as the crystallite size decreased. A formulation of the Raman cross section for scattering from nonpolar microcrystals is presented. The development includes evaluation of the susceptibility correlation function over a limited spatial extent. The results indicate that spectral changes are related to the phonon dispersion, and the wave-vector uncertainty is accounted for. The formulation is applied to describe the BN light scattering results, and good agreement was obtained to describe the observed shift in frequency.