Silicon samples grown under reduced melt convection

Abstract In any crystallization process, convection rules the formation and distribution of impurities and precipitates. Silicon is actually a well studied material; however the distribution of impurities and their related precipitation processes are still not investigated from the point of view of diffusion and segregation phenomena. In principle, experimentation under microgravity can contribute to a better understanding of the processes occurring during solidification since the chemical segregation and distribution of impurities can be studied under purely diffusive transport conditions. In ground experiments, the effect of a reduced melt convection growth process and its effect on the crystal quality could be studied growing silicon by the Axial Heating Process (AHP). For this purpose, a modified Float Zone (FZ) technique using an additional AHP heater submerged into the melt was applied in this work to grow silicon single crystal. The obtained samples were inspected by resistivity measurements and spectroscopic techniques (PL, FT-IR). The spatial distribution of the dopant along the ingot obtained by local resistivity measurements was compared with a theoretical distribution of dopant. PL measurements confirm the high quality level of the grown ingots and infrared spectroscopy reveals low carbon and oxygen concentration. Such an approach seems to be very promising also for solar grade Si solidification for PV applications.