Shallow traps correlated with deep impurities in silicon as obtained by phonon induced conductance

Abstract

At low temperatures shallow neutral donors and acceptors in silicon can bind an extra carrier to form the so-called D- and A+ centers. With the method of phonon-induced electrical conductivity (PIC) we find the same threshold energies for the detachment of these carriers associated with the shallow impurities P and B, as have been obtained previously by FIR measurements. This shows that the detachment is by a one-phonon process. We find that there is no central cell correction for the binding to the deeper acceptors Al and Ga, whereas for In+ the binding energy is as large as 5,8 meV. We interprete this dependence on acceptor species as another example of the shallow-deep instability of the binding energy with the variation of the central cell potential.