Determination of the recombination parameters of a semiconducting material by the Prony method

A generalized Prony method is used to process experimental data of the relaxation type. The method can be used to separate a compound relaxation process into elementary components (damped exponentials) and to systematically trace the variation of their parameters in the presence of external excitation, thereby opening additional channels of information on the generating physical process. The method is applied to the processing of photoconductivity decay data for complex-doped, compensated silicon in the temperature range 100–300 K after pulsed excitation by laser radiation with λ=1.06 μm in a microwave field. The position of the energy level is obtained as 0.17±0.01 eV, in good agreement with the energy of the oxygen-vacancy complex.