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Articles you may be interested in Molecular adsorption on silicon (001): A systematic evaluation of size effects in slab and cluster models AIP Advances 3, 042117 (2013) Nickel is increasingly used in both IC and photovoltaic device fabrication, yet it has the potential to create highly recombination-active precipitates in silicon. For nearly three decades, the accepted nickel diffusivity in silicon has been D Ni ðTÞ ¼ 2:3  10 À3 expðÀ0:47 eV=k B TÞ cm 2 /s, a surprisingly low value given reports of rapid nickel diffusion in industrial applications. In this paper, we employ modern experimental methods to measure the higher nickel diffusivity D Ni ðTÞ ¼ ð1:69 6 0:74Þ Â 10 À4 expðÀ0:15 6 0:04 eV=k B TÞ cm 2 /s. The measured activation energy is close to that predicted by first-principles theory using the nudged-elastic-band method. Our measured diffusivity of nickel is higher than previously published values at temperatures below 1150 C, and orders of magnitude higher when extrapolated to room temperature. V C 2013 AIP Publishing LLC.

Light-induced degradation (LID) is a deleterious effect in crystalline silicon, which is considered to originate from recombination-active boron-oxygen complexes and/or copper-related defects. Although LID in both cases appears as a fast initial decay followed by a second slower degradation, we show that the time constant of copper-related degradation increases with increasing boron concentration in contrast to boron-oxygen LID. Temperature-dependent analysis reveals that the defect formation is limited by copper diffusion. Finally, interface defect density measurements confirm that copper-related LID is dominated by recombination in the wafer bulk. V C 2014 AIP Publishing LLC. [http://dx