Structural properties and electronic transport in intrinsic microcrystalline silicon deposited by the VHF-GD technique

A series of microcrystalline samples was deposited by the very high frequency glow discharge (VHF-GD) technique, with various input powers while keeping all the other parameters of deposition constant. The goal was to correlate transport and structural properties and avoid as much as possible the problem of a variation of the Fermi level between the samples. The observed decrease of the photoconductivity and of the product mobility-lifetime of hole (as measured by time of flight, TOF) with the increase of the power was surprisingly not connected to the structural properties, which remain approximately unchanged, but with a surface contribution to the transport properties.