Influence of copper ions and the crystallographic orientation on the surface properties of germanium in contact with an electrolyte

Abstract

The activation peculiarities and trapping and recombination center parameters caused by copper ion adsorption on a differently oriented germanium surface in contact with a neutral electrolyte were investigated. It is shown that the anisotropy of the fast surface state (FSS) parameters, including the recombination centers, agrees with those for a “pure” and a gold-doped surface, while the activation kinetics is closer to the silverdoped case. From a comparison between the results obtained in this paper and earlier results there follows that the individuality of the metal does not appear essentially in the parameters of activated FSS since these latter are quite close in all cases. It can be assumed that the metal-germanium surface layer bond is the only necessary condition for the generation of a definite kind of structural defects which perform the role of recombination and trapping centers.