Are both thermal and light-induced annealing of metastable defects in a-Si:H driven by electrons?

Results of a search for a unifying rate law for the annealing of metastable defects in hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) are reported. The hypothesis that defect annealing by both heating or illumination is driven by the density of free electrons was tested. This hypothesis is formulated via the rate equation , where N is the defect density, t is the time, A is a constant, n is the free electron density and f(T) is a function of temperature derived from a distribution of annealing energies. The model fits two sets of data, with light-intensity and electrical conductivity as the independent variables, reasonably well, with ranging from 0.39 to 0.76, but not the third set, where the temperature was varied.