Strain Effects on Auger-Meitner Recombination in Silicon

Abstract

We study the effects of compressive and tensile biaxial strain on direct and phonon-assisted Auger-Meitner recombination (AMR) in silicon using first-principles calculations. We find that the application of strain has a non-trivial effect on the AMR rate. For most AMR processes, the application of strain increases the AMR rate. However, the recombination rate for the AMR process involving two holes and one electron is suppressed by 38% under tensile strain. We further analyze the specific phonon contributions that mediate the phonon-assisted AMR mechanism, demonstrating the increased anisotropy under strain. Our results indicate that the application of tensile strain increases the lifetime of minority electron carriers in p-type silicon, and can be leveraged to improve the efficiency of silicon devices.

arXiv commentSupplementary Material included beneath references

References in corpus (10)

• Quantum ESPRESSO: a modular and open-source software project for quantum simulations of materials
• Advanced capabilities for materials modelling with Quantum ESPRESSO
• Maximally localized Wannier functions: Theory and applications
• Quantum ESPRESSO toward the exascale
• Wannier90 as a community code: new features and applications
• Strain engineering of the silicon-vacancy center in diamond
• First-principles predictions of Hall and drift mobilities in semiconductors
• First-principles calculations of indirect Auger recombination in nitride semiconductors
• Fully Anharmonic, Non-Perturbative Theory of Vibronically Renormalized Electronic Band Structures
• Phonon-assisted Auger-Meitner Recombination in Silicon from First Principles