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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 February 2011
The two most outstanding features observed for dopants in hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) - a shift in the Fermi level accompanied by an increase in the defect density and an absence of degenerate doping - have previously been postulated to stem from the formation of substitutional dopant-dangling bond complexes. Using firstprinciples self-consistent pseudopotential calculations in conjunction with a supercell model for the amorphous network and the ability of network relaxation from the first-principles results, we have studied the electronic and structural properties of substitutional fourfoldcoordinated phosphorus and boron at the second neighbor position to a dangling bond defect. We demonstrate that such impurity-defect complexes can account for the general features observed experimentally in doped a-Si:H.