Relaxation Process of the Excited State and Selection Rule in the Soft X-ray Emission of Si and cBN

The soft X-ray emission spectra of Si and cubic boron nitride (cBN) are compared in the Si2p- and B1s-core exciton regions because inversion symmetry is lost and the band gap is extremely large for cBN although both crystal structures are very similar. The background in the soft X-ray emission spectrum of Si is much larger than that for cBN but becomes extremely weak as the excitation energy becomes low and the Raman process becomes dominant compared with the fluorescence process. The background is found to be mainly formed by electron excitation from the valence band to the conduction band. The Raman spectrum is similar to the absorption spectrum in cBN, while those of Si are quite different from each other. It is shown that the centrosymmetry is important in the selection rule of Raman scattering. In resonant Raman scattering the selection rule partly breaks down due to the lattice relaxation process that emits an ungerade phonon in the intermediate state.