Atom probe Tomography of fast-diffusing impurities and the effect of gettering in multicrystalline silicon

Abstract

Investigation of temperature and illumination dependencies of carrier-induced degradation in p-type multi-crystalline silicon

Identification of colloidal silica polishing induced contamination in silicon

“…The copper and nickel found in the mass spectrum of the polished sample, are shown to segregate to the grain boundary in the APT atom maps in Figure 4. The grain boundary was also enriched in both carbon and oxygen (not shown), as seen previously [14]. It is worth stating that counts of Ni and Cu found away from the boundary are background noise in the dataset.…”

“…These impurities have been found to segregate to crystallographic defects, such as grain boundaries and dislocations [11], in addition to forming large intragranular metallic precipitates [12]. Nickel and copper are both known to limit the performance of multicrystalline silicon solar cells, by the decoration of crystallographic defects [13], [14]. They are of particular interest to solar cell producers as potential contaminants, due to their high diffusivity and solubility in silicon enabling the potential for significant in-diffusion at very low temperatures, indeed even room temperature.…”

Imaging and quantifying carrier collection in silicon solar cells: A submicron study using electron beam induced current

“…This has been widely used in evaluating recombination at impurity-decorated grain boundaries and dislocations (Chen et al, 2004;Maximenko et al, 2010). EBIC has also been used in combination with composition and structural characterisation techniques, providing a tool to relate the electrical quality to the atomic level structure of the material (Stoffers et al, 2015;Tweddle et al, 2019Tweddle et al, , 2018. While it is known that nanoscale defects can hamper the performance of mono-and multi-crystalline silicon cells, most techniques have reported millimetre to micron spatial resolution.…”