An analysis of the distributions of electronic states associated with hydrogenated amorphous silicon

We study the distributions of conduction band and valence band electronic states associated with hydrogenated amorphous silicon. We find that there are substantial deviations from square-root distributions of electronic states, particularly deep within the bands and within the gap region. We clearly identify where these distributions of electronic states exhibit square-root functional dependencies by fitting square-root functional forms to some experimental data. The corresponding DOS effective masses are determined, and are found to be about 2 to 4 times greater than the crystalline silicon case. (C) 2005 Springer Science + Business Media, Inc.