Determination of hydrogen concentration in a-Si and a-Ge layers by elastic recoil detection analysis

In this work we have studied the individual a-Si and a-Ge hydrogenated layers prepared by RF sputtering on Si (100) substrates using Ar and H 2 gas mixture. The absolute value of atomic content of the H was determined by Elastic Recoil Detection Analysis (ERDA) with 1.6 MeV 4He + beam. The dynamics of the out diffusion was investigated by annealing in high purity (99.999%) argon atmosphere at 350 °C for several hours. It was clearly shown that hydrogen can diffuse out faster from Ge film than from the Si one during annealing of the samples. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.