Interaction Between Hydrogen and Vacancy Defects in Crystalline Silicon

Abstract

Hydrogen is one of the most important impurities in silicon. It is a mobile and highly reactive species that can passivate dangling bonds at dislocations, surfaces, and interfaces, which has been widely used in the microelectronics and solar cell industry for improving device performance. Vacancy defects are elementary complexes containing dangling bonds, and the study of their interaction with hydrogen is of significant importance. In this work, the interactions of hydrogen with the vacancy‐oxygen complex (VO) and the divacancy (V2) are discussed, which are the most dominant and fundamental vacancy defects stable at room temperature. It is shown that VO and V2 can interact with both atomic and diatomic hydrogen species. This complicates the interpretation of experimental data and results in different reaction paths in differently prepared samples. Besides, some of important electronic properties, particularly electronic levels for V2Hn with n > 1, are not experimentally established.