Effects of grain boundary structure controlled by artificially designed seeds on dislocation generation

Abstract

We investigated the effects of grain boundary (GB) misorientation and the change in GB energy on the generation of dislocations during the directional growth of a crystalline silicon ingot. For this purpose, two ingots were grown using artificially designed seeds to introduce plural GBs with and without misorientation from an ideal coincident site lattice boundary. We revealed that dislocations are frequently generated from Σ3 GB with misorientation. On the other hand, dislocations are hardly observed around naturally formed perfect Σ3 GBs. In addition, we found that Σ5 and Σ25 GBs with higher GB energies are not sensitive to misorientation, and few dislocations are found around Σ25 GBs.