A simple method for reconstructing the density of states of heavily doped silicon

from photoluminescence spectra

Y. Pan
Citation: Journal of Applied Physics 70, 838 (1991); doi: 10.1063/1.349643
View online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.349643
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A simple method for reconstructing the density of states of heavily doped

silicon from photoluminescence
spectra
Y. Pan
Delft Universiv of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering, Electrical Materials Laboratory
P. 0. Box 5031, Mekelweg 4, 2600 GA, Delft, The NetherIan&

(Received 2 January 1991; accepted for publication 4 April

1991)

A simple method is proposed for reconstructing the density of states of heavily doped silicon
from low- and room-temperature photoluminescence spectra. At very low temperatures,
the distribution of minority carriers can be approximated by a Dirac 6 function, which
simplifies the problem significantly. The photoluminescence spectra of boron-doped
silicon with an acceptor density 1.7~ 102cm- 3 are analyzed. We found that the minority
band density of states is lower than the majority band density of states.

I. INTRODUCTION
Heavy doping of silicon causes a reduction of the band
gap and a distortion of the density of states (DOS),
which will significantly affect the minority-carrier transpor+s In spite of the technological importance of heavily
doped silicon, a complete characterization of the density of
states in both conduction and valence bands has not yet
been achieved. Photoluminescence (PL) spectroscopy of
heavily doped silicon has been long considered as the most
powerful probe for the characterization of the band structure. Early work on heavily doped silicon on deducing
bandgap narrowing from the PL spectra can be attributed
to Benoit et aL6 Bergersen et ai., Parsons,8 S&mid et al.,9
and Dumke. Recently Wagner has advanced the state
of art significantly by extending the doping level to
4x 102 cm - 3 and compared the PL results and a new
probe called photoluminescence excitation (PLE) spectroscopy, which is only sensitive to band-to-band excitations.
A lumped parameter called bandgap narrowing based on
the line-shape anaiysisOP was commonly extracted. It was
expected by previous authors that the band tailing effects
can be included by an empirical Gaussian factor. We have
recognized that for low-temperature PL spectra, a symmetrical Gaussian factor cannot incorporate band-tailing effects because the band tails only blur the low-energy cutoff
and have no effects on the high-energy cutoff.12 A good fit
to the PL spectra has not been obtained.
The purpose of this paper is to present a novel method
for the interpretation of the PL spectra which will yield the
energy distribution of DOS of both the conduction and
valence bands.
II. THE RECONSTRUCTING

PROCEDURES

A boron-doped
sample with
a concentration
1.7~ 102cm - 3 will be taken as an example. In Fig. 1 the
electronic transitions possible in a heavily doped p-type
silicon are shown. The measured PL spectra at 20 and 300
K by Wagner are illustrated in Fig. 2. The emission lineshape I(hv) can be expressed, assuming constant matrix
elements, by the convolution of the nonparabolic DOSS
D,(E) and D,(E) weighted by the distribution function

f,(E) and fhW:

838

J. Appl. Phys. 70 (2), 15 July 1991

I(hv) =M

+CO
s--mD,(E)fdE>&&i,

xf..(Ef,,

- hv-

Eph- El

- hv - EPh - E)dE,

(1)

where 1w is a proportionality factor, Eph is the energy of the

phonon which assists the transition. The hole Fermi energy
is taken as the energy reference in the above expression.
Fermi-Dirac statistics is utilized for both the minority and
majority carriers at low temperatures.
An important assumption implied by the constant matrix elements is that the momentum conservation is totally
relaxed. It has been pointed out by Pankovei3 that if the
population of a band is high, the transition will take place
regardless of the difference in the crystal momentum between initial and final states. The impurity scattering and
the carrier-carrier scattering will help to conserve momentum. Wagner has observed clearly a no-phonon replica in
phosphorus doped silicon samples. At that case, the momentum is conserved by the impurity scattering. When the
transition involves two high-energy carriers, the constant
matrix elements approximation may lose its validity. However, this inaccuracy affects only the high-energy part of
the measured PL spectra. It does not affect the extracted
density of states near or below the unperturbed band edges.
Generally, it is impossible to determine either the conduction-band DOS or the valence-band DOS without the
knowledge of the DOS of the opposite band. We will show
below that the energy distribution of the .minority carriers
at low temperatures can be approximated by a Dirac S
function. Thus the majority-carrier band DOS can be extracted unambiguously from the low-temperature PL spectroscopy. It was demonstrated by Wagner that above the
Mott transition, the optical absorption gap as determined
by PLE and the high-energy cutoff of the PL are equal. As
shown in Fig. 1, the optical absorption gap Esab determined
by PLE corresponds to the difference between the minimum energy of the minority carriers and the Fermi energy
of the majority carrier, while the cutoff of the PL (Ewr) is
the energy difference between the maximum energy of the
minority carriers and the Fermi energy of the majority
carriers. The equality of the two cutoffs clearly demonstrates that the energy distribution of minority carriers in

0021-8979/91/020838-03$03.00

0 1991 American Institute of Physics

838

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;;
r)b
E
0

2.00
1.50
1.00

x;
0
4

Energy

Ef.

z
0
a

FIG. 1. Schematic drawing of the density of states and distribution of

carriers of a heavily doped p-type silicon at a very low temperature.
Epb and Egp, are indicated. The dark regions indicate electron occupation.

heavily doped silicon at very low temperature can be described by the Dirac S function.
Equation ( 1) can be rewritten as
-l-m
I( hv) =M

s --co

S ( Efn - hv - Eph - E)

0.50

0.00
-100

-75

-50

-25

25

50

Energy(meV)

FIG. 3. Density of states of the valence band. The solid line is the DOS
extracted from the PL spectra, the dashed line is the DOS from the
least-squares fitting based on Kanes density of state model (6, = 47.3
meV) and the dashed-dotted line is the parabolic density of states. The
hole quasi-Fermi energy at 20 K is approximately 99.0 meV measured
from the zero-energy point in the figure.

XD,(E)fh(E)dE
=MD,(Efn

- hv - Eph)fh(Ef, - hv - Ephj.
(2)

From Eq. (2) we can conclude that the measured PL spectra at low temperatures reflect the energy distribution of
the holes (majority carrier) directly. The quasi-Fermi energy of holes and the DOS of the valence band can be
determined in a self-consistent manner. This means that
the DOS of the valence band can be determined by an
initial guess of the hole quasi-Fermi energy. After we know
the DOS, the quasi-Fermi energy can be recalculated. The
iteration will continue until the difference between the

9
V6
:
ki
0
z
.!i
-5
-v
0
lz
850

940

Photon

1030

1120

1210

Fermi energies in successive steps is sufficiently small.

From the low-temperature spectra, we can determine the
DOS of the valence band up to the energy of the low-temperature Fermi energy. At room temperature, however,
the distribution of the holes will reach the upper part
(higher energy) of the valence band. Therefore an extrapolating procedure for the valence band DOS is required.
This can be realized by fitting the DOS to the Kanes function leaving the standard deviation of the potential energy
fluctuation (8,) as a fitting factor. The density of states
effective mass of the valence band (m$) is taken as
1. lmo, which is close to the room temperature value proposed by Green.14 It has been pointed out by several authors1*5 that the conventional density of states effective
mass (0.59mo) for the valence band is too low to interpret
the measured low-temperature PL spectra. The fitting procedure is completely empirical and it is helpful to filter out
the noise in the DOS, which will easily spoil the deconvolution algorithm based on the fast-Fourier transformation
WW.
If the temperature dependence of the DOS of the valence band is neglected, the energy distribution of holes at
room temperature can be determined. Then the distribution of electrons can be determined by a conventional deconvolution algorithm from the room-temperature spectra
based on Pq. ( 1). The concentration of excess minority
carriers is very small for degenerate silicon because of the
very short lifetime of band-to-band Auger recombination.
Thus Boltzmann statistics is sufficient for electrons. We
write the energy distribution of electrons as

1300

energy(meV)

PIG. 2. PL spectra measured by Wagner for Si:B ( 1.7~ 102 cm-l).

n(E) =D,W)exp

- (E- EfJ
kT

with D,(E) as the conduction band DOS and Ef,, as the

electron quasi-Fermi energy. The concentration of excess

Y.Pan
839
839
J. Appl. Phys., Vol. 70, No. 2, 15 July 1991
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Si:B, conduction

of the potential of the minority and majority carriers which

has previously been recognized by a number of authors.

band

IV. CONCLUSlONS

-100

-75

-50

-25

25

50

Energy(meV)
FIG. 4. Density of states of the conduction band. The solid line is the
DOS extracted from the PL spectra, the dashed line is the least-squares
fitting based on Kanes density of state model (6, = 31.0 meV) and the
dashed-dotted line is the parabolic density of states. The zero-energy point
in the figure is approximately 1.026 eV at 300 K measured from the
zero-energy point in the Fig. 3.

electrons will mainly affect the magnitude of the electron

quasi-Fermi energy. The shape of the energy distribution of
the electrons will not be altered. This implies that the exact
position of the quasi-Fermi energy is irrelevant to the normalized energy distribution of the electrons. However, it is
also impossible to determine the absolute magnitude of the
DOS from the room-temperature PL spectra. The absolute
magnitude of DOS of the conduction band can be obtained
by assuming the unchanged density of states effective mass
of electrons ( 1.09mc) from the lightly doped silicon.
III. RESULTS
The extracted DOS of the valence band is depicted in
Fig. 3 and the comparison with Kanes function with 6,
= 47.3 meV is also illustrated. The default Kanes model
gives the standard deviation of the potential energy fluctuation 119.0 meV, which seems too high to fit the extracted
density of states of the valence band.
The extracted DOS for the conduction band (minority-carrier band) is depicted in Fig. 4. The extracted standard deviation of the potential energy fluctuation (6,) is 3 1
meV and is somewhat smaller than the deviation for the
majority band. This is probably because of the unsymmetry

840

J. Appl. Phys., Vol. 70, No. 2, 15 July 1991

In conclusion, we have successfully reconstructed the

density of states for conduction and valence bands. Kanes
function for the density of states may provide a reasonable
description for the tail states if much lower values for the
standard deviations of the potential fluctuation are taken.
The density of states of the minority band is somewhat
lower than that of the majority band. It is worthwhile to
note that the method is only suitable for very heavily
doped semiconductors. For doping concentrations below
the Mott transition, the 6 function approximation will lose
its validity because of the higher excess carrier density and
significant energy spreading of the minority carriers. The
main assumptions used in our reconstructing procedure are
( 1) a constant transition matrix, and (2) a temperature
independent DOS of the majority-carrier band. Future improvement of the algorithm should be directed on removing these two assumptions. The results are important not
only for modeling minority-carrier transport but also for
modeling operation of tunnel diodes where band tail effects
are crucial.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author wishes to thank J. Wagner for offering
measurement results, S. C. Jain, P. E. Schmid, M. Kleefstra, and W. Crans for helpful discussions.
i E. 0. Kane, Phys. Rev. 131, 79 (1963); Solid State Electron. 28, 3
(1985).
B. I. Halprin and M. Lax, Phys. Rev. 148, 722 (1967).
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(1978)
4 Y. Pan and M. Kleefsta, Semicond. Sci. Technol. 5, 312 (1990).
Y. Pan, J. Appl. Phys. 67, 7393 (1990).
Benoit ala Guillaume and J. Cernogora, Phys. Status Solidi. 35, 599
(1969).
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* R. R. Parson, Solid State Commun. 29, 763 (1979).
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Y. Pan

840

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