No abstract

The effect of five different common surface passivation techniques on the measured bulk lifetime values of multiand monocrystalline p-type silicon wafers was investigated. Mono-[Czochralski (Cz) and floatzone (FZ)] and multicrystalline [mc and edge-defined film-fed growth (EFG)] silicon wafers were either deposited with a dielectric passivating layer of SiN x , Al 2 O 3 , or amorphous silicon (a-Si) or were passivated chemically with 0.08 M iodine-ethanol (IE) or 0.07 M quinhydrone-methanol (QM) solutions. The temporal stability of annealed and nonannealed Cz wafers that were passivated with QM and IE was tested. The lifetime values of EFG, mc, and FZ wafers that were subjected to repeated QM passivation and mc wafers that were subjected to IE passivation without a surface etching between passivations were found to decrease with each passivation. Lifetime values of a set of 11 mc wafers that were passivated with Al 2 O 3 were found to decrease about 30% after a period of four weeks in darkness. The decrease was reversible by annealing the samples. The lifetime values of annealed Cz samples that were passivated with Al 2 O 3 and a-Si were found to decrease by >20% within 5 h of annealing. Subsequent tests on 200-Ω·cm FZ material did (for a-Si) and did not (for Al 2 O 3 ) show surface passivation degradation over this time period. Neighboring mc wafers were passivated dielectrically or wet chemically with IE or QM and characterized with photoluminescence imaging. All mc wafers that were subjected to dielectric passivation methods that include annealing at 400 • C displayed a greater area of high lifetime values but fewer areas of very high lifetime values, providing visible evidence of internal gettering and/or defect redistribution.

A prominent architecture for solar energy conversion layers diverse materials, such as traditional semiconductors (Si, III-V) and transition metal oxides (TMOs), into a monolithic device. The efficiency with which photoexcited carriers cross each layer is critical to device performance and dependent on the electronic properties of a heterojunction. Here, by time-resolved changes in the reflectivity after excitation of an n-GaAs/p-GaAs/TMO (CoO, IrO) device, we detect a photoexcited carrier distribution specific to the p-GaAs/TMO interface through its coupling to phonons in both materials. The photoexcited carriers generate two coherent longitudinal acoustic phonons (CLAPs) traveling in opposite directions, one into the TMO and the other into the p-GaAs. This is the first time a CLAP is reported to originate at a semiconductor/TMO heterojunction. Therefore, these experiments seed future modeling of the built-in electric fields, the internal Fermi level, and the photoexcited carrier density of semiconductor/TMO interfaces within multilayered heterostructures.

While charge transport and surface reactivity have thus far been treated as independent phenomena, the interfacial carrier mobility could be highly dependent on reaction intermediates that carry localized charge and can hop from site to site along the surface. Here, we demonstrate the use of surface sensitive transient optical grating spectroscopy to measure this lateral, interfacial carrier diffusivity at surfaces with different reactivity. We find that for n-GaN, for which substantial charge transfer occurs during equilibration with the water oxidation reaction, the interfacial hole diffusivity increases from air by a factor greater than two under 0.1 M HBr and 0.1 M Na 2 SO 4 aqueous electrolytes.