Observation of electrically detected electron nuclear double resonance in amorphous hydrogenated silicon films

Abstract

We report on the electrical detection of electron nuclear double resonance (EDENDOR) through spin-dependent tunneling transport in an amorphous hydrogenated silicon thin film. EDENDOR offers a many orders of magnitude improvement over classical ENDOR and is exclusively sensitive to paramagnetic defects involved in electronic transport. We observe hyperfine interactions with 1H nuclei very close to silicon dangling bond defects. These observations substantially extend recent EDENDOR observations involving silicon vacancy defects and 14N hyperfine interactions with fairly distant nitrogen atoms in 4H-SiC bipolar junction transistors. We have improved the detection scheme utilized in the earlier study by combining magnetic field modulation with RF amplitude modulation; this combination significantly improves the operation of the automatic power leveling scheme and the overall sensitivity.