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Hyperdoped metastable sulfur atoms endow crystalline silicon with a strong sub-bandgap light absorption. In order to explore such metastable states, we develop a new high-throughput first-principles calculation method to search for all of the energetically metastable states for an interstitial sulfur atom inside crystalline silicon. Finally, we obtain sixty-three metastable interstitial states and they can be classified into ten types. Interestingly, twenty-eight (44% in total) of lower-energy metastable states can produce a well-isolated and half-filled intermediate band (IB) inside silicon forbidden gap, which makes sulfur hyperdoped silicon to be a desirable material for IB solar cells.

Single-crystal silicon wafers were hyperdoped respectively by sulfur, selenium, and tellurium element using ion implantation and nanosecond laser melting. The hyperdoping of such chalcogen elements endowed the treated silicon with a strong and wide sub-bandgap light absorptance. When these hyperdoped silicons were thermally annealed even at low temperatures (such as 200~400 oC), however, this extra sub-bandgap absorptance began to attenuate. In order to explain this attenuation of absorptance, alternatively, we consider it corresponding to a chemical decomposition reaction from optically absorbing structure to non-absorbing structure, and obtain a very good fitting to the attenuated absorptances by using Arrhenius equation. Further, we extract the reaction activation energies from the fittings and they are 0.343(+/- 0.031) eV for S-, 0.426(+/-0.042) eV for Se-, and 0.317(+/-0.033) eV for Te-hyperdoped silicon, respectively. We discuss these activation energies in term of the bond energies of chalcogen-Si metastable bonds, and finally suggest that several high-energy interstitial sites instead of the substitutional site, are very possibly the atomic structures that are responsible for the sub-bandgap absorptance of chalcogen hyperdoped silicon., Comment: 18 pages, 3 figures, 1 table

When the sulfur element is hyperdoped into crystalline silicon to a supersaturated density of 1020 cm-3, it can enhance the sub-bandgap light absorption of silicon from 0 to 70%, with the antireflection of surface dome structures. On the other hand, the local Si: S configuration that can contribute to the strong sub-bandgap absorption is still unknown. In order to find more characteristics of this local Si:S configuration, we thermally annealed the textured sulfur hyperdoped silicon, and analyzed the changes of its optical and electrical properties. We find that the imaginary part of the complex dielectric constant of this Si:S configuration is almost constant in the wavelength range from 1250 nm to 2500 nm ..., Comment: 34 pages, 6 figures, submitted to J. Appl. Physics at Nov. 6th, 2013

The influences of Si sheet doping levels on the properties of InAs/GaAs quantum dots (QDs) are investigated by atomic force microscopy (AFM) and photoluminescence (PL). AFM measurements reveal that Si sheet doping doesn't change the morphology of InAs QDs. Conductive AFM exhibits a quick current decrease when the Si doping density reaches 5\times1011cm-2. PL measurements show that the Si doping can significantly enhance the PL intensity. The PL peak intensity of InAs QDs doped to 5\times1011cm-2 is increased about thirty-five times from that of the undoped ones at 300K. The results observed here can be explained by a supposed positive-charged, strain-relaxed Si-doped thin InAs layer inside the InAs QDs., Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures