Luminescence associated with the presence of dislocations in silicon

A brief account is given of some recent investigations of the luminescence associated with the presence of dislocations in silicon. These investigations show that transition metal contamination is necessary for dislocation related luminescence to be observed in plastically-deformed float-zone silicon and in material containing epitaxial and oxidation-induced stacking faults. Cathodoluminescence spectroscopy and imaging measurements, and photoluminescence measurements on material with low densities of grown-in dislocations, imply that the D3 and D4 luminescence features originate in the dislocation cores, whereas the D1 and D2 features are associated with point defects trapped in the strain fields of dislocations.