Acceptor-oxygen defects in silicon: The electronic properties of centers formed by boron, gallium, indium, and aluminum interactions with the oxygen dimer

It is well established that boron reacts with two oxygen atoms in Czochralski-grown silicon (Cz-Si) to form a defect, which is responsible for the dominant light-induced degradation (LID) in solar cells made from Cz-Si:B material. The detrimental effect of LID has stimulated a move by solar cell manufacturers to the use of silicon with other group-III dopants, particularly with gallium. Cz-Si:Ga is immune to the BO-type LID. The information available in the literature on the interactions of oxygen with either Al, Ga, or In impurities in Si is limited. We use ab initio modeling and junction spectroscopy techniques to study a family of defects with unusual electronic properties, which have been detected in Cz-Si samples doped with different shallow acceptor species. We have carried out detailed measurements of the temperature dependencies of hole emission rate, equilibrium occupancy, and hole capture kinetics for the traps observed in differently doped p-type Cz-Si samples. It is found from the analysis of the changes in magnitude of the deep-level-transient signals with temperature that the equilibrium occupancy function of the traps is characteristic for a defect with negative-U properties in all the samples. The positions of the E(-/+) occupancy level of the defects are very close in differently doped samples, E(-/+) = Ev + (0.31 ± 0.01) eV. It is argued that the oxygen dimer interacts with group-III atoms in silicon and these interactions result in the formation of AsO2 complexes (A is either B, Al, Ga, or In atom) with very similar electronic properties.