Probing carrier dynamics in implanted and annealed polycrystalline silicon thin films using white light

Polycrystalline silicon thin film samples implanted and annealed at various temperatures have been studied using ultrafast laser pulse excitation. Nondegenerate pump-probe technique has been utilized to investigate carrier dynamics in the highly implanted samples at a relatively small fluence. A model based on two coupled differential equations has been used to fit the experimental data, giving a simple but adequate picture of the dynamics of this system. Basic sample parameters such as carrier trapping times, diffusion coefficient, and penetration depths have been extracted, providing a dependence on the annealing temperature for the samples under investigation. (c) 2006 American Institute of Physics.