Laser induced lifetime degradation in p-type crystalline silicon

Pulsed, green laser irradiation of uncoated p-type silicon leads to a significant reduction of the effective minority carrier lifetime. The reason for the lifetime drop lies in the introduction of recombination centres into the laser melted and recrystallized surface layer, leading to a low local minority carrier lifetime τ ≈ 10 ns inside this surface layer. The laser treatment introduces the impurities oxygen, carbon and nitrogen into the silicon and further leads to an n-type doping of the surface layer. There are strong indications that these impurities are responsible for the observed n-type doping, as well as the lifetime reduction after irradiation. Both effects are removed by thermal annealing. An estimate shows that the low local lifetime does nevertheless not affect the performance of industrial or contacted selective solar cell emitter structures.