Self-interstitial migration during ion irradiation of boron delta-doped silicon

• Boron delta layers in silicon, grown by molecular beam epitaxy and characterized by the secondary ion mass spectrometry, have been employed to investigate the migration of silicon self-interstitials during irradiation with MeV protons in the 500-850 degreesC temperature range. After growth, the samples were thinned from the backside to a thickness that made them transparent for the proton energies used. As a result, the generation rate of point defects can be considered as essentially uniform throughout the samples. However: the evolution of the boron profiles is almost identical to that observed after injection of self-interstitials caused by thermal oxidation of the samples at elevated temperature. This strongly indicates that the surface acts as a reflective boundary for the migrating self-interstitials or/ and an efficient sink for mobile vacancies. Furthermore, higher value of interstitial supersaturation in the near-surface region in proton-irradiated samples is consistent with experimentally detected depth dependence for immobile fraction in boron clusters. Then, activation energy of boron mobilization, (0.9 +/- 0.4) eV, was attributed to the dissociation of boron clusters.

Nyckelord

boron

silicon

proton irradiation

enhanced diffusion

clustering

point-defects

enhanced diffusion

dopant diffusion

si

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