Modeling the Annealing of Dislocation Loops in Implanted c-Si Solar Cells

This paper is motivated by the question of how residual implantation damage degrades solar cell performance. In order to avoid such degradation, annealing processes of implanted c-Si solar cells use high thermal budgets. Still, implantation-induced dislocation loops may survive these processes. We derive two models for the annealing kinetics of dislocation loops that are suitable for the study of high thermal budgets: a model that is able to describe the parallel ripening of faulted and perfect dislocation loops and a model that explicitly implements the conservative and nonconservative processes associated with Ostwald ripening. Both models lead to a better agreement with the experiment than what has been published before.