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The importance of staying clean Wafer-thin sheets of silicon are increasingly being used in "silicon-on-insulator" (SOI) technology, in which electrically conducting silicon films are laid down on top of a thick slab of insulating silicon dioxide. But as researchers strive to make the films ever thinner, they worry that imperfections in the silicon could trap mobile charge carriers -- electrons and "holes" -- at the interface between the two materials and so prevent the material from conducting.
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