title: Metastability of amorphous silicon from silicon network rebonding.
abstract: We propose a network rebonding model for light-induced metastability in amorphous silicon, involving bonding rearrangements of silicon and hydrogen atoms. Nonradiative recombination breaks weak silicon bonds and generates dangling bond-floating bond pairs, with very low activation energies. The transient floating bonds annihilate, generating local hydrogen motion. Charged defects are also found. Support for these processes is found with tight-binding molecular dynamics simulations. The model accounts for major experimental features of the Staebler-Wronski effect including electron-spin resonance data, the t(1/3) kinetics of defect formation, two types of metastable dangling bonds, and hysteretic annealing.
authors: Department of Physics and Astronomy, Microelectronics Research Center, and Ames Laboratory, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa 50011, USA.
authors: R
authors: R
authors: Biswas
authors: B C
authors: BC
authors: Pan
authors: Y Y
authors: YY
authors: Ye