Study of intrinsic defects in semiconductors with radioactive probes

The use of radioactive probes to study defects in semiconductors is describ ed. We present the application of Moessbauer Spectroscopy (MS) and Perturbe d Angular Correlation Spectroscopy (PAC) with the emphasis on studying intr insic defects (vacancies and self-interstitials). In order to obtain the si mplest possible defect situation the defects are produced in such a way tha t mainly isolated single Frenkel pairs are created. This is done either by the neutrino recoil technique which utilizes the probe atom as the primary knock-on atom or by electron irradiation. Experiments performed with elemen tal and III-V semiconductors are described. It is shown that a wealth of mi croscopic defect information can be obtained. A clean doping of the samples with radioactive probes is fundamental to the experiments. The production of the probes by heavy-ion induced nuclear reactions and their incorporatio n by a recoil implantation technique is a versatile method giving access to a wide variety of probes and allows to utilize short lived species. (C) 19 98 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.