Studies of the Microscopic Nature of Cu-Pairs in Silicon

Abstract

AbstractStudies of the thermal dissociation kinetics of Cu-pairs in p-type silicon revealed that the dissociation energy of the pairs is 1.02±0.07 eV, which is twice as large as the binding energy of a coulombically bound donor-acceptor pairs formed by singly charged ions placed on nearest neighbor <111> sites. The dependence of the hole emission rate from the center versus electric field in the depletion region was found to be much weaker than predicted by the Pool-Frenkel law. On the other hand, the polarization potential describing emission from a neutral impurity gave a satisfactory fit to the experimental data. It is concluded that the Cu-pair is a donor with either covalent or mixed type of bonding of interstitial and substitutional copper atoms.