Hyperdoping silicon with tellurium by ion implantation and ultra-short annealing for optoelectronics

Hyperdoping silicon with chalcogen atoms is a topic of increasing interest due to the strong sub-band gap absorption exhibited by the resulting materials, which can be exploited to develop infrared photodectectors and intermediate band solar cells [1-3]. In our work, tellurium-hyperdoped silicon layers have been fabricated by ion implantation followed by flash lamp annealing (FLA) or pulsed-laser melting (PLM). The Rutherford backscattering spectrometry / Channeling (RBS/C) results reveal the high-quality recrystallization of tellurium implanted silicon by both FLA and PLM. From the transport measurements, an insulator-to-metal transition is observed with increasing tellurium concentration. Moreover, the ellipsometry measurements show that the band gap narrows with increasing doping concentration. And the Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy show that tellurium hyperdoped Si has strong infrared absorption. All these results give us a signal that hyperdoped silicon with tellurium could enable silicon-based optoelectronics in the infrared band.

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[2] Tabbal, M., et al., Appl. Phys. A 98, 589–594 (2010)
[3] Umezu, I., et al., J. Appl. Phys. 113, 213501 (2013)