Lattice location and electrical activation of tellurium in hyperdoped silicon


Lattice location and electrical activation of tellurium in hyperdoped silicon

Wang, M.; Berencén, Y.; Prucnal, S.; Hübner, R.; Yuan, Y.; Xu, C.; Rebohle, L.; Böttger, R.; Heller, R.; Skorupa, W.; Helm, M.; Zhou, S.

Silicon hyperdoped with chalcogens beyond the equilibrium solubility limit exhibits sub-band gap optical absorption, presenting a potential material for silicon-based optoelectronic applications [1-3]. In our work, tellurium hyperdoped silicon was obtained by ion implantation combined with pulsed laser melting. The crystallization of implanted layers and the lattice location of impurities in silicon matrix were determined by the Rutherford backscattering spectrometry / channeling (RBS/C). The chemical states of tellurium dopants in tellurium-hyperdoped silicon were probed by the tellurium K-edge X-ray absorption fine structure spectroscopy. The electrical transport reveals the insulator-to-metal transition (IMT) in tellurium-hyperdoped silicon, which is confirmed and understood by using calculations based on the density functional theory. However, the critical tellurium concentration for IMT is much higher than the calculated value. The lattice location results suggest that a significant fraction of the tellurium atoms form dimers, which are electrically deactivated. After considering this fraction, the critical concentration claimed from the DFT calculation is consistent with the number of electrically activated tellurium atoms.

[1] T. G. Kim, J.M. Warrender, M. J. Aziz, Applied Physics Letters 88(24), 2006, 1850.
[2] M. Tabbal, T. G. Kim, D. N. Woolf, et al. Applied Physics A 98(3), 2010, 589-594.
[3] Y. Berencén, S. Prucnal, L. Fang, et al. Scientific Reports 7, 2017, 43688.

Keywords: hyperdoped Si; Rutherford backscattering spectrometry; channeling (RBS/C); insulator-to-metal transition (IMT)

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