Photoinduced Structural Changes in Hydrogenated Amorphous Silicon

ABSTRACTPolarized electroabsorption method has been used to study photo-induced structural changes in hydrogenated amorphous silicon. The field-modulated absorption signal consists of two components, one of which is the true polarization-dependent electroabsorption serving as an indicator of the structural disorder, and the other is the thermoabsorption resulted from the temperature modulation due to Joule heating. The thermoabsorption component has removed from the observed field-modulated absorption signal to make an accurate and reliable evaluation of structural disorder by phase-separation procedure. As a result, about 15-25 % of the observed signal arises from the thermoabsorption effect for the Tauc gap region. Nevertheless, any essential alteration is not needed for our previous PEA results. The internal stress as well as density have been measured to provide another evidences for the photo-induced structural change. It is found that amorphous silicon film expands and the density tends to decrease upon light-exposure, the temporal behaviors of which coincide with that of the PEA ratio factor indicating disorderness of the amorphous network structure. The results permit us to conclude that a large scaled change in the amorphous network structure occurs under light-exposure, which might proceed the light-induced creation of metastable dangling bond defects.