Effect of doping by boron, carbon, and nitrogen atoms on the magnetic and photocatalytic properties of anatase

Abstract

The effect of doping of titanium dioxide with the anatase structure by boron, carbon, and nitrogen atoms on the magnetic and optical properties and the electronic spectrum of this compound has been investigated using the ab initio tight-binding linear muffin-tin orbital (TB-LMTO) band-structure method in the local spin density approximation explicitly including Coulomb correlations (LSDA + U) in combination with the semiempirical extended Huckel theory (EHT) method. The LSDA + U calculations of the electronic structure, the imaginary part of the dielectric function, the total magnetic moments, and the magnetic moments at the impurity atoms have been carried out. The diagrams of the molecular orbitals of the clusters Ti3 X (X = B, C, N) have been calculated and the pseudo-space images of the molecular orbitals of the clusters have been constructed. The effect of doping on the nature and origin of photocatalytic activity in the visible spectral range and the specific features of the generation of ferromagnetic interactions in doped anatase have been discussed based on the analysis of the obtained data. It has been shown that, in the sequence TiO2 − y N y → TiO2 − y C y → TiO2 − y B y (y = 1/16), the photocatalytic activity can increase with the generation of electronic excitations with the participation of impurity bands. The calculated magnetic moments for boron and nitrogen atoms are equal to 1 μB, whereas the impurity carbon atoms are nonmagnetic.