Optical and electrical properties of textured sulfur hyperdoped silicon: a thermal annealing study

Abstract

When the sulfur element is hyperdoped into crystalline silicon to a supersaturated density of 1020 cm-3, it can enhance the sub-bandgap light absorption of silicon from 0 to 70%, with the antireflection of surface dome structures. On the other hand, the local Si: S configuration that can contribute to the strong sub-bandgap absorption is still unknown. In order to find more characteristics of this local Si:S configuration, we thermally annealed the textured sulfur hyperdoped silicon, and analyzed the changes of its optical and electrical properties. We find that the imaginary part of the complex dielectric constant of this Si:S configuration is almost constant in the wavelength range from 1250 nm to 2500 nm ...