Morphological stability during solidification of silicon incorporating metallic impurities

Abstract

We study the stability of a planar solidification front during pulsed laser melting-induced rapid solidification of silicon containing high concentrations of ion-implanted metallic impurities. We calculate the critical impurity concentration for destabilizing plane-front solidification, and introduce the “amplification coefficient,” which is an empirical parameter describing the degree of amplification that must occur between the time the planar liquid-solid interface first becomes unstable, and the time of formation of morphological features of interface breakdown that is later observed in the microstructure. By connecting our calculations to experimental observations from the literature, we determine this parameter for Au, Co, Cr, Fe, Ga, In, and Zn in (100) Si and Ti in (111) Si, and find that it increases with impurity diffusive speed vD approximately as vD0.56. We present an approximate but simple method of estimating the maximum impurity concentration that may be incorporated in a surface layer of a given thickness without the appearance of cellular breakdown.