Electrical Conduction Mechanisms in the Disordered Material System P-type Hydrogenated Amorphous Silicon

• Main Author: Shrestha, Kiran (Engineer)
• Other Authors: Littler, C. L.
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: University of North Texas 2014
• Subjects: Electrical conductivity; variable range hopping; raman spectroscopy; short and mid-range order; raman electrical correlation; Amorphous substances.; Silicon.; Thin films > Electric properties.; Thin films > Optical properties.; Boron.; Hydrogen.; Electric conductivity.
• Online Access: https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc700106/

The electrical and optical properties of boron doped hydrogenated amorphous silicon thin films (a-Si) were investigated to determine the effect of boron and hydrogen incorporation on carrier transport. The a-Si thin films were grown by plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) at various boron concentrations, hydrogen dilutions, and at differing growth temperatures. The temperature dependent conductivity generally follows the hopping conduction model. Above a critical temperature, the dominant conduction mechanism is Mott variable range hopping conductivity (M-VRH), where p = ¼, and the carrier hopping depends on energy. However, at lower temperatures, the coulomb interaction between charge carriers becomes important and Efros-Shklosvkii variable hopping (ES-VRH) conduction, where p=1/2, must be included to describe the total conductivity. To correlate changes in electrical conductivity to changes in the local crystalline order, the transverse optical (TO) and transverse acoustic (TA) modes of the Raman spectra were studied to relate changes in short- and mid-range order to the effects of growth temperature, boron, and hydrogen incorporation. With an increase of hydrogen and/or growth temperature, both short and mid-range order improve, whereas the addition of boron results in the degradation of short range order. It is seen that there is a direct correlation between the electrical conductivity and changes in the short and mid-range order resulting from the passivation of defects by hydrogen and the creation of trap states by boron. This work was done under the ARO grant W911NF-10-1-0410, William W. Clark Program Manager. The samples were provided by L-3 Communications.