Comparison of Dark and Light-Induced Annealing of Metastable Defects in a-Si:H

Abstract

ABSTRACTWe propose a rate law that unifies the dark and light-induced annealing of metastable defects in hydrogenated Amorphous silicon (a-Si:H). Its form is dN/dt ∼ - C Naf (T), where N is the defect density, C the concentration of free electrons (holes), f (T) a dispersive function, t the time, and T the temperature. Special dark and light-annealing experiments, designed to keep the free electron density constant, were conducted to eliminate C from the rate law. We find that f (T) for the dark annealing process differs from that for light-annealing. We calculated the thermal activation energies for the decay of N to 1/e of its initial value. They are 1.56±0.2 eV for dark annealing and 0.91±0.2 eV for light-induced annealing.