Ab initio study of the EFG tensor at Cd impurities in Sc2O3 semiconductor

摘要

We present an ab initio study of diluted Cd impurities localized at both cation sites of the semiconductor Sc2O3. The electric-field-gradient (EFG) tensor at Cd impurities located at both cationic sites of the host structure was determined from the calculation of the electronic structure of the doped system. Calculations were performed with the full-potential augmented-plane wave plus local orbitals (APW+lo) method within the framework of the density functional theory. We studied the atomic structural relaxations and the perturbation of the electronic charge density induced by the impurities in the host system in a fully self-consistent way. We showed that the Cd impurity introduces an increase of 8% in the nearest oxygen neighbors bond-lengths, changing the EFG sign for probes located at the asymmetric cation site. The APW+lo predictions for the charged state of the Cd impurity were compared with EFG results existent in the literature, coming from time-differential gamma-gamma perturbed-angular-correlations experiments performed on Cd-111-implanted Sc2O3 powder samples. From the excellent agreement between theory and experiment, we can strongly suggest that the Cd acceptor impurities are ionized at room temperature. Finally, we showed that simple calculations like those performed within the point-charge model with antishielding factors do not correctly describe the problem of a Cd impurity in Sc2O3.