A Light-Induced Annealing of Silicon Implanted Layers

Since introducing Rapid Thermal Annealing, there has been disagreement among experimental data of ion-implanted and annealed layers. One explanation of these differences is the impact of optical irradiation and its interaction with semiconductor material. Although no plausible explanation has been offered, experimental evidence of “photonic effects” was reported in many works. In this work we estimate energy per atom available during recombination of the excited carriers. It is argued that the localization of energy states inside the band gap in ion-implant damaged material is responsible for “photonic effects.”