Interplay of Ni and Au Atoms with Dislocations and Vacancy Defects Generated by Moving Dislocations in Si

Abstract

We show experimentally that dislocations in Si crystals can generate some unknown vacancy complexes Vxtrail in their slip planes during their motion at 600°C. Most of these “dislocation trail defects” are not electrically active but can be detected by their reaction with gold atoms during in-diffusion experiments. It was also shown that contrary to gold, the Vxtrail-complexes do not react with interstitial Ni atoms. It means that the binding energy Ebind of Vxtrail complexes is quite high (Ebind>2.5eV), higher than the binding energy of vacancy complexes generated during FZ-Si crystal growth. It was also shown that Ni in-diffusion results in a strong increase of electron-hole recombination at dislocations and in a strong increase of dislocation-related DLTS C-line.