MINIMIZATION OF THE DENSITY OF EOR DEFECTS AFTER PREAMORPHISATION ANDTHERMAL ANNEALING

In this paper Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) investigations ha ve been carried out on End Of Range (EOR) defects found in preamorphis ed silicon after annealing. We show by means of image contrast analysi s that the EOR defects are interstitial dislocation loops having (111) habit planes and burgers vectors of a/3<111> or a/2<110>. The conjunc tion of these TEM experiments with computer simulations have been used to identify the mechanism of formation of EOR defects. They are shown to be the result of agglomeration of interstitial atoms, generated by bombardment, surviving thermal recombination with the vacancies locat ed beneath the crystal/amorphous (c/a) interface.