Interstitial Transition Metal Doping in Hydrogen Saturated Silicon Nanowires

We report a first principles systematic study of atomic, electronic, and magnetic properties of hydrogen saturated silicon nanowires (H-SiNW) which are doped by transition metal (TM) atoms placed at various interstitial sites. Our results obtained within the conventional GGA+U approach have been confirmed using an hybrid functional. In order to reveal the surface effects we examined three different possible facets of H-SiNW along [001] direction with a diameter of ~2nm. The energetics of doping and resulting electronic and magnetic properties are examined for all alternative configurations. We found that except Ti, the resulting systems have magnetic ground state with a varying magnetic moment. While H-SiNWs are initially non-magnetic semiconductor, they generally become ferromagnetic metal upon TM doping. Even they posses half-metallic behavior for specific cases. Our results suggest that H-SiNWs can be functionalized by TM impurities which would lead to new electronic and spintronic devices at nanoscale.

Hybrid exchange-correlation functional for accurate prediction of the electronic and structural properties of ferroelectric oxides

Using a linear combination of atomic orbitals approach, we report a systematic comparison of various Density Functional Theory (DFT) and hybrid exchange-correlation functionals for the prediction of the electronic and structural properties of prototypical ferroelectric oxides. It is found that none of the available functionals is able to provide, at the same time, accurate electronic and structural properties of the cubic and tetragonal phases of BaTiO$_3$ and PbTiO$_3$. Some, although not all, usual DFT functionals predict the structure with acceptable accuracy, but always underestimate the electronic band gaps. Conversely, common hybrid functionals yield an improved description of the band gaps, but overestimate the volume and atomic distortions associated to ferroelectricity, giving rise to an unacceptably large $c/a$ ratio for the tetragonal phases of both compounds. This super-tetragonality is found to be induced mainly by the exchange energy corresponding to the Generalized Gradient Approximation (GGA) and, to a lesser extent, by the exact exchange term of the hybrid functional. We thus propose an alternative functional that mixes exact exchange with the recently proposed GGA of Wu and Cohen [Phys. Rev. B 73, 235116 (2006)] which, for solids, improves over the treatment of exchange of the most usual GGAs. The new functional renders an accurate description of both the structural and electronic properties of typical ferroelectric oxides.