On the generation and annealing of dangling bond defects in hydrogenated amorphous silicon

We show that, through the diffusive re-arrangement of Si-H bonds, the a-SiH lattice is able to establish thermal equilibrium between the densities of band tail trapped charge carriers and dangling bond defects. When this equilibrium is disturbed by changes in temperature, carrier injection or illumination, dangling bond defects have to be generated or annealed out via H-diffusion processes. Based on the concept of charge-induced bond breaking, we develop a mathematical formalism for the diffusive re-arrangement of Si-H bonds and show that our formalism can account for a variety of observations that have been made in the context of defect-generation and annealing experiments.