English

Electronic structure, structural and optical properties of thermally evaporated CdTe thin films

Materials Science 2009-11-11 v1

Abstract

Thin films of CdTe were deposited on glass substrates by thermal evaporation. From the XRD measurements itis found that the films are of zinc-blende-type structure. Transmittance, absorption, extinction, and refractive coefficients are measured. Electronic structure, band parameters and optical spectra of CdTe were calculated from ab initio studies within the LDA and LDA+U approximations. It is shown that LDA underestimates the band gap, energy levels of the Cd-4d states, s-d coupling and band dispersion. However, it calculates the spin-orbit coupling correctly. LDA+U did not increase much the band gap value, but it corrected the s-d coupling by shifting the Cd-4d levels towards the experimentally determined location and by splitting the LDA-derived single s peak into two peaks, which originates from admixture of s and d states. It is shown that the sd coupling plays an important role in absorption and reflectivity constants. The calculated optical spectra fairly agree with experimental data. Independent of wave-vector scissors operator is found to be a good first approximation to shift rigidly the band gap of CdTe underestimated by LDA.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0608141,
  title  = {Electronic structure, structural and optical properties of thermally evaporated CdTe thin films},
  author = {S. Lalitha and S. Zh. Karazhanov and P. Ravindran and S. Senthilarasu and R. Sathyamoorthy and J. Janabergenov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0608141},
  year   = {2009}
}