Microscopic nature of Staebler-Wronski defect formation in amorphous silicon

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Light-induced metastable defects in a-Si:H are proposed to be silicon dangling bonds accompanied by pairs of hydrogen atoms breaking a silicon bond, forming a complex with two Si-H bonds. This supports the model of Branz. These defects are the analog of the H2* defect in c-Si and their energy correlates with the bond-angle strain. Several features of the annealing are well described by this defect complex.