EPR studies of silicon irradiated at 20.4 K and 4.2 K by 1.5 MeV and 46 MeV electrons are described. In 46 MeV irradiations the dominant defects formed appear to be divavancies and other multiple defect aggregates which liberate vacancies throughout the anneal to room temperature as they reorder, recombine, etc. For 1.5 MeV irradiations group III atoms play a vital role in p- and n-type materials in trapping interstitials and stabilizing damage. Carbon and oxygen are not effective interstitial traps at these temperatures. Evidence of limited vacancy migration during irradiation is also cited. Two distinct excited configurations of vacancy-oxygen pairs are identified as precursors to A-centre formation in n-type silicon. The kinetics for their conversion to A-centres depends strongly upon the Fermi level as does the isolated vacancy migration energy whhich is measured to be 0.18 ± 0.02 eV for the V^＝ charge state. The vacancy has four charge states, V^＋, V⁰, V^－ and V^＝. Kinetics for hole release from V^＋ reveals an activation barrier of 0.057 eV. The concentration of V^＋ at 20.4 K in boron-doped material indicates the corresponding donor level even closer to the band edge, approximately E_V ＋ 0.039 eV. Jahn-Teller energies for V⁰, V^＋, and V^－ are estimated from stress-alignment studies and confirmed to be large. Kinetics studies for reorientation from one Jahn-Teller distortion to another are also described for each charge state.

Electron paramagnetic resonance and ab initio supercell calculations suggest that the P6/P7 centers, which were previously assigned to the photoexcited triplet states of the carbon vacancy-antisite pairs in the double positive charge state, are related to the triplet ground... (Read more)