Research on the stability, electronic properties, and structure of a-Si:H and its alloys. Final subcontract report, 1 June 1991--31 May 1994

The authors research has focused on defect metastability and a-Si:C:H alloys. A new aspect of the metastability is the growing interest in the defect recovery process. They have continued to explore the role of hydrogen in the metastability and other properties of a-Si:H. This has led them to perform first principles calculations of Si-H bonding configurations. Another new feature of the metastability work is the study of the effects in hydrogenated poly-silicon. They have grown and studied the properties of a-Si:C:H alloys, particularly to observe the effects of hydrogen dilution. Finally they have also studied the recent defect relaxation phenomenon, and concluded that the effects arise from contact effects and are not an intrinsic effect in a-Si:H. Section A presents some recent models of metastability. Section B discusses the metastability and equilibration effects in hydrogenated polysilicon, studied because of it`s close similarity to a-Si:H. Section C describes results on a-Si:C:H alloys. Section D contains first principle LDA calculations of Si-H bonds and relates these results to the a-Si:H diffusion and metastability properties. In section E the authors report capacitance measurements aimed at exploring the recent results by Cohen et al who find an anomalous relaxation process from the trap filling kinetics of a DLTS experiment