Kinetic aspects of the growth of hydrogen induced platelets in SiC

Abstract
Annealing of heavily hydrogen-implanted silicon carbide (SiC) leads to the formation of one specific type of defect: hydrogen induced platelets. These defects may be regarded as two-dimensional precipitates of H atoms stored in a stable configuration. In this article, we have studied the growth kinetics of these platelets upon annealing in the 800–1000 °C range by transmission electron microscopy. We show that the growth of these defects proceeds through the exchange of H atoms with the result that larger ones grow at the expense of the smaller ones during annealing. This process can be described in terms of a conservative Ostwald ripening mechanism. The activation energy for this growth is found to be about 3.4 eV, a value similar to that observed for the “effective” diffusion of H in heavily H-implanted SiC.

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