ABSTRACTThis paper is concerned with the phenomenon of the increase of the holes lifetime with the increase of the dangling bond concentration in a-Si:H. This rather surprising phenomenon that was observed, but not discussed, previously is shown to be a non-trivial effect which is based on the charged nature of the dangling bonds and a special scenario of the concentrations of the various defect states in the material. The most important implication of our study is that the charged dangling bonds can sensitize the valence band tail states, in contrast with the accepted roles of these types of states. The present understanding suggests that many new interesting phototransport phenomena can be found in a-Si:H.
ABSTRACTWe discuss the subtle effects involved in observing slow dangling bond relaxation by studying capacitance transients in p-type hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H). The data suggest that neutral dangling bonds are reversibly converted into metastable positive charged dangling bonds by hole trapping. These metastable positive dangling bonds reconvert to neutral dangling bonds upon annealing at elevated temperature. The annealing kinetics for this process are the same as those observed for annealing of quenched in conductivity changes in p-type a-Si:H.
Theoretical study of isolated dangling bonds, dangling bond wires, and dangling bond clusters on aH:Si(001)−(2×1)surface