The influence of thermal relaxation on implantation induced disorder accumulation

A detailed analysis is made of disorder accumulation under direct ion implantation amorphous zone generation conditions where the zone size can thermally relax both during and after implantation. It is shown that this leads to considerable complexity in the behaviour of the amorphous fraction f as a function of ion fluence Φ, ion flux density J and substrate temperature T. Steady state and low amorphous fraction solutions show how zone expansion or contraction processes can be distinguished. (author)