The magnitude of the renormalization of the band gaps due to zero-point motions of the lattice is calculated for 18 semiconductors, including diamond and silicon. This particular collection of semiconductors constitute a wide range of band gaps and atomic masses. The renormalized electronic structures are obtained using stochastic methods to sample the displacement related to the vibrations in the lattice. Specifically, a recently developed one-shot method is utilized where only a single calculation is needed to get similar results as the one obtained by standard Monte-Carlo sampling. In addition, a fast real-space GW method is employed and the effects of G 0 W 0 corrections on the renormalization are also investigated. We find that the band-gap renormalizations inversely depend on the mass of the constituting ions, and that for the majority of investigated compounds the G 0 W 0 corrections to the renormalization are very small and thus not significant.
Transition metal impurities are known to adversely affect the efficiency of electronic and optoelectronic devices by introducing midgap defect levels that can act as efficient Shockley-Read-Hall centers. Iron impurities in GaN do not follow this pattern: their defect level is close to the conduction band and hence far from midgap. Using hybrid functional first-principles calculations, we uncover the electronic properties of Fe and we demonstrate that its high efficiency as a nonradiative center is due to a recombination cycle involving excited states. Unintentional incorporation of iron impurities at modest concentrations (1015 cm–3) leads to nanosecond nonradiative recombination lifetimes, which can be detrimental for the efficiency of electronic and optoelectronic devices.
We present an ab initio density-functional-theory approach for calculating electron-phonon interactions within the projector augmented-wave (PAW) method. The required electron-phonon matrix elements are defined as the second derivative of the one-electron energies in the PAW method. As the PAW method leads to a generalized eigenvalue problem, the resulting electron-phonon matrix elements lack some symmetries that are usually present for simple eigenvalue problems and all-electron formulations. We discuss the relation between our definition of the electron-phonon matrix element and other formulations. To allow for efficient evaluation of physical properties, we introduce a Wannier-interpolation scheme, again adapted to generalized eigenvalue problems. To explore the method's numerical characteristics, the temperature-dependent band-gap renormalization of diamond is calculated and compared with previous publications. Furthermore, we apply the method to selected binary compounds and show that the obtained zero-point renormalizations agree well with other values found in literature and experiments.
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