The Decay of Self-Trapped Holes in Silver-Chloride

A detailed study is made of the thermally-activated decay of photo-produced self-trapped holes in AgCl doped with copper. We find that simple first or second order kinetics do not adequately describe the decay. However, fits to Waite's equation for a diffusion-limited reaction are successful to within the accuracy of the data. In addition, the fitting parameters have physically reasonable values. A similiar study is made on other self-trapped hole centers in mixed chloride/bromide crystals. We also observe a subpopulation of self-trapped holes in AgCl with unusually high thermal stability.