Photoluminescence evolution in self-ion-implanted and annealed silicon

(Received 16 December 2008; revised manuscript received 24 April 2009) Si + ion-implanted silicon wafers are annealed at different temperatures from room temperature to 950 ◦ C and then characterized by using the photoluminescence (PL) technique at different recorded temperatures (RETs). Plentiful optical features are observed and identified clearly in these PL curves. The PL spectra of these samples annealed in different temperature ranges are correspondingly dominated by different emission peaks. Several characteristic features, such as an R line, S bands, a W line, the phonon-assistant WTA and SiTO peaks, can be detected in the PL spectra of samples annealed at different temperatures. For the samples annealed at 800 ◦C, emission peaks from the dislocations bounded at the deep energy levels of the forbidden band, such as D1 and D2 bands, can be observed at a temperature as high as 280 K. These data strongly indicate that a severe transformation of defect structures could be manipulated by the annealing and recorded temperatures. The deactivation energies of the main optical features are extracted from the PL data at different temperatures.