Effect of a magnetic field on the starting stress and mobility of individual dislocations in silicon

Abstract

The strong effect of a magnetic field on the starting stress and mobility of individual dislocations is discovered in silicon grown by the Czochralski method with a high concentration of dissolved oxygen. It is shown that exposure of dislocations preliminarily introduced into the sample to a magnetic field considerably reduces the starting stresses for the motion of these dislocations. The effect is not observed in samples with a low oxygen concentration. It is assumed that the magnetic field induces singlet-triplet transitions in thermally excited states of silicon-oxygen complexes in the dislocation core, thus stimulating a change in the state (atomic configuration) of oxygen already located at dislocations. As a result, the mean binding energy of oxygen with a dislocation decreases.