Experimental tests of the autocompensation model of doping

Abstract

Abstract In 1986 the present authors proposed a generalization of Street's original model of autocompensation doping that enables doping, compensation and photoinduced degradation in amorphous silicon (a-Si) to be treated within a unified approach. This paper gives a brief account of the thermal equilibrium formalism and discusses experiments aimed at testing the underlying theoretical assumptions. on implantation and bias-annealing experiments support the idea of an intrinsic relaxation mechanism and the assumption of independent processes for the formation of dopant and defect sites. Kinetic experiments show that the position of the Fermi energy does not uniquely determine the rate of relaxation of quenched-in non-equilibrium states. An interesting aspect of the kinetic process is that ‘Meyer-Neldel’ rules are observed both in electronic transport as well as in thermalization processes.