Formation Mechanism and Recombination-Enhanced Dissociation of a Hydrogen-Carbon Complex in Silicon

Abstract

ABSTRACTWc have found that chemical etching induced an electron trap E3 (0.15) into n-typc Si. We attribute this trap to a hydrogen-carbon complex on the basis of available experimental data. By measuring DLTS depth profiles of the E3 trap, we propose a model of the formation mechanism of the hydrogen-carbon complex as follows. Hydrogen atoms arc adsorbed on the Si surface to terminate Si dangling bonds during chemical etching, and after the etching some unstably adsorbed ones diffuse into the near-surface region of silicon and are trapped by carbon to form the complex. The E3 trap is stable up to 100δC in the dark but is annihilated by the illumination of band gap light around 250K only outside the depletion layer of the Schottky structure. This provides unambiguous experimental evidence for the recombination-enhanced dissociation, in which the electronic energy released by the electron-hole recombination at the E3 level is converted into local kinetic energy of hydrogen to be released from carbon.