paper

High-dielectric constant and wide band gap inverse silver oxide phases of the ordered ternary alloys of SiO, GeO and SnO

arXiv:cond-mat/0607353 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.74.193201

Abstract

High-dielectric constant and wide band gap oxides have important technological applications. The crystalline oxide polymorphs having lattice constant compatibility to silicon are particularly desirable. One recently reported candidate is the inverse silver oxide phase of SiO. First-principles study of this system together with its isovalent equivalents GeO, SnO as well as their ternary alloys are performed. Within the framework of density functional theory both generalized gradient approximation and local density approximation (LDA) are employed to obtain their structural properties, elastic constants and the electronic band structures. To check the stability of these materials, phonon dispersion curves are computed which indicate that GeO and SnO have negative phonon branches whereas their ternary alloys SiGeO, SiSnO, and GeSnO are all stable within LDA possessing dielectric constants ranging between 10 to 20. Furthermore, the lattice constant of SiGeO is virtually identical to the Si(100) surface. The band gaps of the stable materials are computed which restore the wide band gap values in addition to their high dielectric constants.

Published version; two figures merged into one