Furrukh S. Khan

Extended Si |P[311|P] defects

We perform total energy calculations based on the tight-binding Hamiltonian scheme (i) to study the structural properties and energetics of the extended {311} defects depending upon their dimensions and interstitial concentrations and (ii) to find possible mechanisms of interstitial capture by and release from the {311} defects. The generalized orbital-based linear-scaling method implemented on Cray-T3D is used for supercell calculations of large scale systems containing more than 1000 Si atoms.

Dynamical properties of Au from tight-binding molecular-dynamics simulations

We studied the dynamical properties of Au using our previously developed tight-binding method. Phonon-dispersion and density-of-states curves at T=0 K were determined by computing the dynamical-matrix using a supercell approach. In addition, we performed molecular-dynamics simulations at various temperatures to obtain the temperature dependence of the lattice constant and of the atomic mean-square-displacement, as well as the phonon density-of-states and phonon-dispersion curves at finite temperature. We further tested the transferability of the model to different atomic environments by simulating liquid gold. Whenever possible we compared these results to experimental values.

THERMALLY ACTIVATED REORIENTATION OF DI-INTERSTITIAL DEFECTS IN SILICON

We propose a di-interstitial model for the P6 center commonly observed in ion implanted silicon. The di-interstitial structure and transition paths between different defect orientations can explain the thermally activated transition of the P6 center from low-temperature C1h to room-temperature D2d symmetry. The activation energy for the defect reorientation determined by ab initio calculations is 0.5 eV in agreement with the experiment. Our di-interstitial model establishes a link between point defects and extended defects, di-interstitials providing the nuclei for the growth.

Validity of the Boltzmann equation in high electric fields

The authors derive a transport equation for electrons in semiconductors coupled weakly to phonons in the presence of a strong electric field which is spatially uniform and time independent. Within weak scattering a careful treatment of the distribution function f(k) leads to a transport equation which is indistinguishable from the Boltzmann equation for electric fields as high as 107 V cm-1.

Parallel decomposition of the tight-binding fictitious Lagrangian algorithm for molecular dynamics simulations of semiconductors

We present a parallel decomposition of the tight‐binding fictitious Lagrangian algorithm for the Intel iPSC/860 and the Intel Paragon parallel computers. We show that it is possible to perform long simulations, of the order of 10 000 time steps, on semiconducting clusters consisting of as many as 512 atoms, on a time scale of the order of 20 h or less. We have made a very careful timing analysis of all parts of our code, and have identified the bottlenecks. We have also derived formulas which can predict the timing of our code, based on the number of processors, message passing bandwidth, floating point performance of each node, and the set up time for message passing, appropriate to the machine being used. The time of the simulation scales as the square of the number of particles, if the number of processors is made to scale linearly with the number of particles. We show that for a system as large as 512 atoms, the main bottleneck of the computation is the orthogonalization of the wave functions, which consumes about 90% of the total time of the simulation.