The mechanism via which minority carrier injection led to the annealing of the defects which were created by the irradiation of n-type material was considered. A precise determination was made of the energy levels of the electron traps which annealed out. The annealing kinetics were monitored as a function of temperature and injection density. It was demonstrated that the mechanism which had originally been proposed in order to explain injection annealing was not applicable here. That mechanism required that the activation energy for thermal annealing be decreased by an amount which was equal to the energy that was released by hole trapping. A different mechanism was proposed in which injection annealing was assumed to be athermal, and was induced by alternate captures of electrons and holes at the defect site.

T.Neffati, J.C.Bourgoin: Physical Review B, 1997, 55[15], 9564-70