Chapter 10 Hydrogen Migration and Solubility in Silicon

This chapter discusses the energetics and kinetics of the incorporation of hydrogen into the simplest and most studied of its possible hosts, crystalline silicon of high perfection, containing known concentrations of shallow donor or acceptor impurities. The chapter presents a review on the results of the phenomenological parameters describing macroscopic or semi-macroscopic behavior: kinds of species present in solid solutions, their solubilities and transformation energies, and their diffusion coefficients and interconversion rates. The chapter presents a number of hitherto unpublished results obtained by the authors on hydrogen migration and solubility in silicon over the past several years. Details of atomic models are discussed in the chapter in brief for clarifying the phenomenological understanding. The chapter describes various laws needed for a quantitative theoretical description of the thermodynamic properties of a dilute solid solution and of the various rate processes that occur when such a solution departs from equilibrium.