@article{6a97d74f8a5d44c98fee4d94bf9ae11a,
title = "Nickel: A very fast diffuser in silicon",
abstract = "Nickel is increasingly used in both IC and photovoltaic device fabrication, yet it has the potential to create highly recombination-active precipitates in silicon. For nearly three decades, the accepted nickel diffusivity in silicon has been D N i (T) = 2.3 × 10 - 3 exp (- 0.47 eV / k B T) cm 2/s, a surprisingly low value given reports of rapid nickel diffusion in industrial applications. In this paper, we employ modern experimental methods to measure the higher nickel diffusivity D N i (T) = (1.69 ± 0.74) × 10 - 4 exp (- 0.15 ± 0.04 eV / k B T) cm2/s. The measured activation energy is close to that predicted by first-principles theory using the nudged-elastic-band method. Our measured diffusivity of nickel is higher than previously published values at temperatures below 1150°C, and orders of magnitude higher when extrapolated to room temperature.",
author = "J. Lindroos and Fenning, {D. P.} and Backlund, {D. J.} and E. Verlage and A. Gorgulla and Estreicher, {S. K.} and H. Savin and T. Buonassisi",
note = "Funding Information: We acknowledge A. A. Istratov (Siltronic) for providing high-purity Float Zone silicon; R. Reedy (NREL) for providing SIMS measurements; H. J. Choi for providing XRF assistance, D. M. Powell for sample heating-rate simulations, and V. Modi for furnace temperature profiling. This research was supported primarily by the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-EE0005314. The work of S.K.E. is supported in part by the Grant No. D-1126 from the R. A. Welch Foundation. J.L. acknowledges the support of the Fulbright-Technology Industries of Finland Grant and the Ernst Wirtzen Fund, and D.P.F. an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. This work was performed in part at the Harvard Center for Nanoscale Systems (CNS), a member of the National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network (NNIN), which is supported by the National Science Foundation under NSF Award No. ECS-0335765. The High Performance Computer Center at Texas Tech provided generous amounts of computer time.",
year = "2013",
month = may,
day = "28",
doi = "10.1063/1.4807799",
language = "English",
volume = "113",
journal = "Journal of Applied Physics",
issn = "0021-8979",
publisher = "AIP Publishing",
number = "20",
}