Determination of crystallite propagation in laser annealed amorphous silicon by normal incidence spectral reflectance

Abstract

Analysis of normal incidence spectral reflectivity of excimer laser annealed α-Si:H shows that the annealed material can be modeled as a stratified system comprising a large-grained polycrystalline layer, a fine grained polycrystalline layer, and residual amorphous silicon in agreement with transmission electron microscopy. Optically, the large-grained poly-Si behaves as single-crystal silicon and the fine-grained material is modeled, using effective medium theory, as a mixture of single-crystal silicon and amorphous silicon.