Radiochemical determination of damage profiles in silicon

Abstract

A novel technique for the study of structural damage incurred by single crystal silicon targets during ion implantation is described. The method is based upon copper-decoration of the vacancy rich damaged region, followed by radiochemical measurement of the resulting copper distribution. Utilizing neutron activation, sharply peaked radiocopper profiles are obtained, which are believed to represent the depth distributions of large, relatively immobile defects such as vacancy clusters, voids, or crystalline faults. A more efficient decoration of isolated vacancy-type defects is realized when Wu is employed as a radioisotopic tracer in the decoration step, however, the rapid diffusivity of these smaller species leads to less sharply defined radiocopper profiles. Both the neutron activation and radiotracer modifications of the technique yield damage profiles which are significantly shallower than the corresponding implanted impurity profiles.