Study of the radiative and non-radiative recombination processes at dislocations in silicon by photoluminescence and LBIC measurements

It is well known that the sharp, room temperature luminescence emission at 1.54 mu m from dislocated silicon has set off a great interest for this material in view of its applications in the third window of optical telecommunications. For this reason the dislocation related luminescence in silicon addressed recently a number of investigation aimed at understanding the mechanism of light emission. The problem is still unsolved as most of the experiments done gave contradictory answers to the main questions open, which concern the intrinsic or extrinsic nature of dislocation luminescence and the effect on it of reconstruction, interaction or passivation processes, possibly assisted by metallic or non-metallic impurities. In order to go more insight on the problem, we started a systematic work on CZ silicon, aimed at understanding the properties of dislocation luminescence. The identification of the energy levels involved in the different dislocation PL bands has been obtained.