Effect of charge on bond strength in hydrogenated amorphous silicon

Clare, B.W., Talukder, G., Jennings, P.J., Cornish, J.C.L. and Hefter, G.T. (1994) Effect of charge on bond strength in hydrogenated amorphous silicon. Journal of Computational Chemistry, 15 (6). pp. 644-652.

Abstract

We have studied the effect of excess charge on the bond strength in the silanes SiH4 and Si2H6 to assess whether charge trapping in a solid-state lattice might promote the technologically important photodegradation of amorphous silicon alloys (the Staebler-Wronski effect). The calculations indicate that both positive and negative charges reduce the strength of SiH and SiSi bonds considerably, to the point where they may be broken easily by visible or even infrared light.