The response of sputtered amorphous phosphorus to intense ion bombardment

Amorphous phosphorus prepared by radio-frequency sputtering has been subjected to ion bombardment, and its dc resistivity then measured as a function of temperature, electric field and annealing temperature. Variable range hopping is the dominant conduction mechanism after bombardment, even following thermal annealing at room temperature. After bombardment at 10 K and annealing at 100 K, the density of states deduced from a single-phonon model of this form of transport is 1.5−5×10 17 states eV −1 cm −3 , and the localisation length is ~10 A.