Search

We present time-resolved measurements of the relaxation between the orbital states of the shallow acceptor boron in silicon. The silicon host was enriched Si-28, which exhibits life-time broadened absorption lines. We observed a wide range of T1 lifetimes from 6ps to 130ps depending on the excited state and the pump intensity. The fastest transients have not been observed previously in the time domain, and they are caused by the phonon relaxation responsible for the small-signal frequency domain line-width. We identify the slower components with an ionisation/recombination/cascade pathway.

We present results for the lifetime of the orbital transitions of Bi donors in Si, measured using both frequency domain and time-domain techniques, allowing us to distinguish between homogeneous and inhomogeneous processes. The proximity of the energy of the optically allowed transitions to the optical phonon energy means that there is an unusually wide variation in the lifetimes and broadening mechanisms for this impurity, from fully homogeneous lifetime-broadened transitions to fully inhomogeneously broadened lines. The relaxation lifetime (T1) of the states range from the low 10’s to 100’s of ps, and we find that there is little extra dephasing (so that T1 is of the order of T2/2) in each case.