Reactivation of sub-bandgap absorption in chalcogen-hyperdoped silicon

Silicon doped with nonequilibrium concentrations of chalcogens using a femtosecond laser exhibits near-unity absorption of sub-bandgap photons to wavelengths of at least 2500 nm. Previous studies have shown that sub-bandgap absorptance decreases with thermal annealing up to 1175 K and that the absor...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Newman, Bonna Kay, Buonassisi, Tonio, Sher, Meng-Ju, Mazur, Eric
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: American Institute of Physics (AIP) 2013
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/78013
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8345-4937
Description
Summary:Silicon doped with nonequilibrium concentrations of chalcogens using a femtosecond laser exhibits near-unity absorption of sub-bandgap photons to wavelengths of at least 2500 nm. Previous studies have shown that sub-bandgap absorptance decreases with thermal annealing up to 1175 K and that the absorption deactivation correlates with chalcogen diffusivity. In this work, we show that sub-bandgap absorptance can be reactivated by annealing at temperatures between 1350 and 1550 K followed by fast cooling (>50 K/s). Our results suggest that the defects responsible for sub-bandgap absorptance are in equilibrium at high temperatures in hyperdoped Si:chalcogen systems.