2 research outputs found
Thermodynamic Stability Trend of Cubic Perovskites
Stability is of central
importance in current perovskite solar
cell research and applications. Goldschmidt tolerance factor (<i>t</i>) recently provided qualitative guidance for experimentalists
to engineer stable ABX<sub>3</sub> perovskite by tuning effective
ionic size with mixing cations or anions and for theorists to search
emerging perovskites. Through first-principles calculations, we have
calculated decomposition energies of 138 perovskite compounds of potential
solar cell applications. Instead of <i>t</i>, we have found
that (μ + <i>t</i>)<sup>η</sup>, where μ
and η are the octahedral factor and the atomic packing fraction,
respectively, demonstrates a remarkably linear correlation with thermodynamic
stability. As a stability descriptor, (μ + <i>t</i>)<sup>η</sup> is able to predict the relative stability among
any two perovskites with an accuracy of ∼90%. This trend is
then used to predict decomposition energies of another 69 perovskites,
and the results are in excellent agreement with first-principles calculations,
indicating the generalization of the trend. This thermodynamic stability
trend may help the efficient high-throughput search for emerging stable
perovskites and precise control of chemical compositions for stabilizing
current perovskites
Direct Observation of Group‑V Dopant Substitutional Defects in CdTe Single Crystals
Point defect chemistry strongly affects
the fundamental
properties
of materials and has a decisive impact on device performance. The
Group-V dopant is prominent acceptor species with high hole concentration
in CdTe; however, its local atomic structure is still not clear owing
to difficulties in definitive measurements and discrepancies between
experimental observations and theoretical models. Herein, we report
on direct observation of the local structure for the As dopant in
CdTe single crystals by the X-ray fluorescence holography (XFH) technique,
which is a powerful tool to visualize three-dimensional atomic configurations
around a specific element. The XFH result shows the As substituting
on both Cd (AsCd) and Te (AsTe) sites. Although
AsTe has been well known as a shallow acceptor, AsCd has not attracted much attention and been discussed so far.
Our results provide new insights into point defects by expanding the
experimental XFH study in combination with theoretical first-principles
studies in II–VI semiconductors