Issue |
EPL
Volume 99, Number 4, August 2012
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | 47005 | |
Number of page(s) | 4 | |
Section | Condensed Matter: Electronic Structure, Electrical, Magnetic and Optical Properties | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1209/0295-5075/99/47005 | |
Published online | 21 August 2012 |
Anisotropy of the carrier effective masses in bulk α-PbO
1 Thunder Bay Regional Research Institute - 290 Munro St., Thunder Bay, ON, P7B 5E1, Canada
2 Department of Physics, Lakehead University - 955 Oliver Road, Thunder Bay, ON, P7B 5E1, Canada
(a) berashej@tbh.net
Received: 18 June 2012
Accepted: 18 July 2012
The electronic properties of an individual α-PbO layer and bulk material consisting of stacked interacting layers are studied with the first-principle calculations. It was found that while for an individual layer the top of the valence band is extremely flat, for stacked layers it becomes dispersive due to the interlayer interaction. As a result, an effective mass of holes drops from m*h = 38m0 in a single layer to m*h = 2.44m0 in bulk α-PbO. In contrast, the conduction band is almost independent of the layer interaction: for both individual layer and bulk material the bottom of the conduction band is characterized by sharp dispersion. The electron effective mass is practically unchanged and is about m*e = 0.4m0. The calculation of the electron density distribution suggests that heavy holes are a result of a strong localization of lone pair p electrons on the oxygen atom which form the top of the valence band. A similar effect of heavy holes is observed for another photoconductor like amorphous Se (Gobrecht H. and Tausend A., in Proceedings of the International Conference on the Physics of Semiconductor, Paris, 1964 (Academic Press Inc., New York) 1965, p. 1189) for which the lone pairs of the valence electrons play an important role in photo-generation.
PACS: 71.20.Nr – Semiconductor compounds / 71.18.+y – Fermi surface: calculations and measurements; effective mass, g factor / 85.60.Gz – Photodetectors (including infrared and CCD detectors)
© EPLA, 2012
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