Hello everyone,
Is the radiation causing different types of defects in semiconductors ?
And if yes, what are the types of defects created by radiation in semiconductor materials ?
It depends on the semiconductor types and the types of radiation
Yes! the radiation induced different types of defects in semiconductors.
In p‐type germanium there is a process of rearrangement of a defect center at about 200°K, exhibiting first order kinetics, but with a time constant which is strongly dependent upon the charge state of the defect.
I am supposing that you are talking about semiconductors as particle detectors.
In general, radiation damages semiconductor detectors, from low energy applications like an HPGe detector measuring environmental samples (keV) to the large scale ones, like the pixel detectors at the ATLAS experiment (TeV).
The damage depends of the energy of the incident radiation, the degradation of a detector can be estimated, p.e., by looking to the resolution at certain energies.
I recommend you to read Techniques for Nuclear and Particle Physics Experiments by William R. Leo, Chapter 10. In special, section 10.3 and 10.4. One type of defect could be that radiation can breaks the charge collection and the detector response could not be proportional to the energy deposited by the particle.
For semiconductors in general, like microcontrollers, I don't know so much about. Geant4 has some applications for this topic. Geant4 and radiation effects applied to electronics.
Thank you, to be more clear i am talking about the effect of the space radiation on solar cells for space applications and types of defects created by space radiation in solar cells.
Radiation causes damages in semiconductors. Except only for neutrinos, the alpha, beta, gamma, proton and neutron radiation induces changes in crystal structure, depending this on type (alpha, beta, ...), energy of it, exposure time and material irradiated (related to cross section). As an example, it is very well known thermo-mechanical effects of radiation (hardening, embrittlement, creep, growth, conductivity, ...). In www.iaea.org there are quite many articles and reports on this subject.
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