Experimental Study of the Impact of Stress on the Point Defect Incorporation during Silicon Growth

Abstract

This paper is the first experimental report about the impact of thermal stress on the point defect during the silicon crystal growth. We investigated the change of the critical v/G for the defect-free crystal growth by the thermal stress, where v is the growth rate and G is the axial temperature gradient at the crystal-melt interface. Experimental result has shown that the compressive stress reduces the critical v/G and increases the incorporated vacancies. Our result corresponded well to the stress effect by the changes of the formation enthalpy of the point defects estimated by ab intio calculation.