Temperature behaviour of extended defects in solar grade silicon investigated by photoluminescence and EBIC

Spatially resolved photoluminescence and EBIC were used to characterise a sample of multicrystalline silicon in the temperature range 80–300 K. The dislocation related lines in the spectrum-D1, D2, D3 and D4 correlate with the total recombination activity measured by EBIC. The temperature dependent EBIC behaviour was utilised to access the contamination level at the dislocations in low quality regions of the sample. The temperature dependence of D1 line shows a maximum at about 150 K. The decrement of D1 peak area upon temperature decreasing below 150 K could be related to the appearance of D3 and D4 lines in the photoluminescence spectra. The peak widths of D1 and D2 show opposite temperature dependence. D1 width decreases and D2 becomes broader upon decreasing temperature. Two additional lines with energies below the energy of band-to-band luminescence were observed together with the D bands at 80 K. They could be related to phonon replication of the band edge luminescence peak and can be seen on FZ-Si too.