This comprehensive book reports on recent investigations of lattice imperfections in semiconductors by means of positron annihilation. It reviews positron techniques, and describes the application of these techniques to various kinds of defects, such as vacancies, impurity vacancy complexes and dislocations.

The lifetime of a positron inside a solid is normally less than a fraction of nanosecond. This is a very short time on a human scale, but is long enough to enable the positron to visit an extended region of the material, and to sense the atomic and electronic structure of the environment. Thus, we can inject a positron in a sample to draw from it some signal giving us information on the microscopic properties of the material. This idea has been successfully developed in a number of positron-based techniques of physical analysis, with resolution in energy, momentum, or position. The complex of these techniques is what we call now positron spectroscopy of solids. The field of application of the positron spectroscopy extends from advanced problems of solid-state physics to industrial applications in the area of characterization of high-tech materials. This volume focuses the attention on the physics that can be learned from positron-based methods, but also frames those methods in a wider context including other experimental approaches. It can be considered as a textbook on positron spectroscopy of solids, the sort of book that the newcomer takes for his approach to this field, but also as a useful research tool for the expert.

The lifetime of a positron inside a solid is normally less than a fraction of nanosecond. This is a very short time on a human scale, but is long enough to enable the positron to visit an extended region of the material, and to sense the atomic and electronic structure of the environment. Thus, we can inject a positron in a sample to draw from it some signal giving us information on the microscopic properties of the material. This idea has been successfully developed in a number of positron-based techniques of physical analysis, with resolution in energy, momentum, or position. The complex of these techniques is what we call now positron spectroscopy of solids. The field of application of the positron spectroscopy extends from advanced problems of solid-state physics to industrial applications in the area of characterization of high-tech materials. This volume focuses the attention on the physics that can be learned from positron-based methods, but also frames those methods in a wider context including other experimental approaches. It can be considered as a textbook on positron spectroscopy of solids, the sort of book that the newcomer takes for his approach to this field, but also as a useful research tool for the expert.

The positron annihilation, experimental and theoretical results obtained for bismuth are presented, mainly concerning the open volume defects created during compression and dry sliding. Positron lifetime in vacancy clusters increases with the size of the cluster; however, it saturates at the value of about 0.42 ns already for six vacancies in a cluster. Similar values were resolved in the positron lifetime spectra of bismuth samples exposed to dry sliding. Detection of the subsurface zone in bismuth exposed to dry sliding reveals exponential decay of vacancy clusters concentration with the depth increase from the worn surface. The high strain of about 70% was evaluated in the layer adjoined the worn surface The temperature of recrystallization obtained from the isochronal measurements of annihilation line shape parameter was equal about 90°C, and the activation energy for grain migration is about 0.84 ± 0.11 eV.