Electrical and optical activities of small angle grain boundaries in multicrystalline Si

Abstract

We have characterized the electrical and optical activities of small grain boundaries (SA‐GBs) by using electron‐beam‐induced current (EBIC) and cathodoluminescence (CL). EBIC observation at room temperature indicates that the SA‐GBs are grouped into two categories. SA‐GBs with misorientation angle lower than 1° shows lower EBIC contrast like <10%, named as “general”. Those with 2‐3° have higher contrast more than 20%, named as “special”. At 100 K, all the SA‐GBs become visible and their contrast increases. On the other hand, CL observation at 15 K shows that general SA‐GBs show D3 and D4, while special ones show D1 and D2. We explained these properties of SA‐GBs in terms of dislocation model. General SA‐GBs are regarded as the ensemble of individual dislocations. Special SA‐GBs are composed of the densely aligned dislocations in which dislocation interaction takes place (© 2011 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)

Structure and Properties of Dislocations in Silicon

“…Numerous measurements on individual grain boundaries in multi-crystalline silicon were presented. Recent results about the electrical activity of grain boundaries obtained by EBIC methods were published, for instance, by Chen et al (2010), Sekiguchi et al (2011), or Pandelov et al (2002. These papers refer to numerous others published previously.…”