Riad Shaltaf

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 BaTiO3 and PbTiO3. 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 with ferroelectricity, giving rise to an unacceptably large c/a ratio for the tetragonal phases of both compounds. This supertetragonality 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.

Band Offsets at the Si/SiO2 Interface from Many-Body Perturbation Theory.

We use many-body perturbation theory, the state-of-the-art method for band-gap calculations, to compute the band offsets at the Si/SiO2 interface. We examine the adequacy of the usual approximations in this context. We show that (i) the separate treatment of band structure and potential lineup contributions, the latter being evaluated within density-functional theory, is justified, (ii) most plasmon-pole models lead to inaccuracies in the absolute quasiparticle corrections, (iii) vertex corrections can be neglected, and (iv) eigenenergy self-consistency is adequate. Our theoretical offsets agree with the experimental ones within 0.3 eV.

Dynamical, dielectric, and elastic properties of GeTe investigated with first-principles density functional theory

The dynamical, dielectric, and elastic properties of GeTe, a ferroelectric material in its low-temperature rhombohedral phase, have been investigated using first-principles density functional theory. We report the electronic energy bands, phonon-dispersion curves, electronic and low-frequency dielectric tensors, infrared reflectivity, Born effective charges, and elastic and piezoelectric tensors and compare them with the existing theoretical and experimental results, as well as with similar quantities available for other ferroelectric materials, when appropriate.

Quasiparticle calculations of the electronic properties of ZrO2 and HfO2 polymorphs and their interface with Si

Quasiparticle calculations are performed to investigate the electronic band structures of various polymorphs of Hf and Zr oxides. The corrections with respect to density-functional-theory results are found to depend only weakly on the crystal structure. Based on these bulk calculations as well as those for bulk Si, the effect of quasiparticle corrections is also investigated for the band offsets at the interface between these oxides and Si assuming that the lineup of the potential at the interface is reproduced correctly within density-functional theory. On the one hand, the valence-band offsets are practically unchanged with a correction of a few tenths of electron volts. On the other hand, conduction-band offsets are raised by 1.3-1.5 eV. When applied to existing calculations for the offsets at the density-functional-theory level, our quasiparticle corrections provide results in good agreement with the experiment.

Lattice dynamics and specific heat of alpha-GeTe: Theoretical and experimental study

We extend recent ab initio calculations of the electronic band structure and the phonon-dispersion relations of rhombohedral GeTe to calculations of the density of phonon states and the temperature-dependent specific heat. The results are compared to measurements of the specific heat. It is discovered that the specific heat depends on hole concentration, not only in the very low temperature region (Sommerfeld term) but also at the maximum of C-p/T-3 (around 16 K). To explain this phenomenon, we have performed ab initio lattice-dynamical calculations for GeTe rendered metallic through the presence of a heavy-hole concentration (p similar to 2x10(21) cm(-3)). They account for the increase observed in the maximum of C-p/T-3.