Reply to “Comment on ‘Contributions of vacancies and self-interstitials to self-diffusion in silicon under thermal equilibrium and nonequilibrium conditions’ ”

Suezawa et al. [Phys. Rev. B 90, 117201 (2014)] claim in their Comment that the data reported by Shimizu et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 095901 (2007)] and Kube et al. [Phys. Rev. B 88, 085206 (2013)] on silicon self-diffusion for temperatures between 900 and 735 degrees C are affected by carbon and vacancy clusters and, accordingly, do not reflect self-diffusion under thermal equilibrium conditions. We demonstrate in our Reply that an impact of carbon on self-diffusion can definitely be excluded. In addition it is rather unlikely that the self-diffusion data reported by Shimizu et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 095901 (2007)] and Kube et al. [Phys. Rev. B 88, 085206 (2013)] are affected by the dissolution of vacancy clusters since strong differences exist not only in the preparation of the samples used for the experiments, but also in the time of diffusion. Finally, the vacancy formation enthalpy deduced by Suezawa et al. [J. Appl. Phys. 110, 083531 (2011)] from quenching experiments is consistent with the value obtained from the temperature dependence of the vacancy formation enthalpy reported by Kube et al. [Phys. Rev. B 88, 085206 (2013)]. Overall we conclude that the quenching experiments of Suezawa et al. [J. Appl. Phys. 110, 083531 (2011)] cannot disprove the interpretation of the low-temperature self-diffusion data reported by Shimizu et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 095901 (2007)] and Kube et al. [Phys. Rev. B 88, 085206 (2013)].