Self-interstitial migration during ion irradiation of boron delta-doped silicon

Abstract

Boron delta layers in silicon, grown by molecular beam epitaxy and characterized by the secondary ion mass spectrometry, have been employed to investigate the migration of silicon self-interstitials during irradiation with MeV protons in the 500–850°C temperature range. After growth, the samples were thinned from the backside to a thickness that made them transparent for the proton energies used. As a result, the generation rate of point defects can be considered as essentially uniform throughout the samples. However, the evolution of the boron profiles is almost identical to that observed after injection of self-interstitials caused by thermal oxidation of the samples at elevated temperature. This strongly indicates that the surface acts as a reflective boundary for the migrating self-interstitials or/and an efficient sink for mobile vacancies. Furthermore, higher value of interstitial supersaturation in the near-surface region in proton-irradiated samples is consistent with experimentally detected depth dependence for immobile fraction in boron clusters. Then, activation energy of boron mobilization, (0.9±0.4) eV, was attributed to the dissociation of boron clusters.