Postdeposition thermal annealing and material stability of 75 °C hydrogenated nanocrystalline silicon plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition films
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the material stability and effects of postdeposition thermal annealing of highly crystalline undoped hydrogenated nanocrystalline silicon (nc-Si:H) films prepared by conventional 13.56-MHz plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition at 75 °C. Electrical, structural, and chemical composition properties of the nc-Si:H films at ambient atmosphere were studied before and after the thermal annealing. The as-grown nc-Si:H films showed not only a low dark conductivity (σdark) of the order of 10−7–10−6S∕cm but also good stability after exposure to ambient atmosphere due to low oxygen concentration (CO∼2×1018atoms∕cm3) and stable hydrogen passivation of grain boundaries. On the other hand, the σdark and photoconductivity (σphoto) of the nc-Si:H films showed instability during annealing at temperatures higher than the deposition temperature and subsequent exposure to ambient atmosphere. Here, both the σdark and σphoto increased after annealing and then decreased with exposure to ambient atmosphere. In particular, the σdark decreased below the as-grown value proportional to the annealing temperature. This was not observed in nc-Si:H films which have a hydrogenated amorphous silicon nitride (a-SiN:H) passivation layer on the same time scale. There was no significant change in the microstructure of the films. However, the hydrogen concentration (CH) decreased slightly after annealing, while the CO increased. The conductivity instability is therefore strongly related to oxygen desorption and absorption due to thermal annealing and subsequent exposure to ambient atmosphere, respectively. Based on the experimental results, we propose a simple model in terms of hydrogen effusion-assisted oxygen absorption.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".