Electrophysical characteristics of the Cd x Hg 1-x Te solid solutions, including the concentration of charge carriers and their mobility and lifetime, are covered adequately. It is demonstrated that they are determined primarily by the native defects of the crystal lattice formed mainly by mercury vacancies [1]. At the same time, the properties of the crystal lattice of mercury chalcogenide solid solutions, including Cd x Hg 1-x Te, have been investigated much less than the properties of their electron subsystem. Therefore, of definite interest is a study of the specific heat С p for the Cd x Hg 1-x Te solid solutions, since vibrations of the crystal lattice give the main contribution to this physical characteristic.In the present work, the temperature dependence of С р for the Cd x Hg 1-xTe solid solutions with х = 0, 0.19, 0.43, and 1 were measured at temperatures in the interval 6-300 K. At 77 K, the concentration of charge carriers in the examined single crystals is close to the intrinsic one. For calorimetric measurements, samples shaped as rectangular parallelepipeds with dimensions of 10 × 10 × 2 mm were used, with the degree of uniformity of the composition within the limits х = 0.005 (measured with an x-ray microanalyzer). The temperature dependence of the specific heat was measured by the quasiadiabatic method using a BKT-3.05 calorimeter in zero magnetic field when temperatures increased from 6 to 300 K. Figure 1 shows the results of calorimetric measurements for the Cd 0.19 Hg 0.81 Te and Cd 0.43 Hg 0.57 Te solid solutions.A comparison of the temperature dependences of the specific heat for the Cd 0.19 Hg 0.81 Te and Cd 0.43 Hg 0.57 Te solid solutions shown in Fig. 1 reveals the special feature of the dependence С р (Т) for the solution with х = 0.43 near the temperature Т = 175 K. This effect commonly testifies to structural reorganization of the crystal lattice. The thermal energy of the examined special feature -0.15 eV -is comparable to the energy of point defect annealing or decomposition of point defects comprising tellurium vacancy -cadmium ion complexes (∼0.1 eV [2]). This assumption is also confirmed by the fact that this special feature was not observed for the solid solution with х = 0.19 containing much less number of cadmium ions.The low-temperature section of the experimental curves is insufficiently accurately approximated by the classical formula С р = α·Т 3 (the difference between С р and С V for Cd x Hg 1-x Te was comparable with the error of our measurements), which caused significant uncertainty in the Debye temperature Θ D determined by this method. Therefore, the Debye temperature was calculated using an original program in the Mathematica environment. The contribution of the crystal lattice to the specific heat was calculated using the Debye function tabulated for different Θ D (100 theoretical Debye functions corresponding to Θ D values lying in the interval 100-200 K with a step of 1 K were obtained). Subsequent subtraction of this contribution from the specific heat yielded a...
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