First-principles study of neutral silicon interstitials in 3C- and 4H-SiC

Abstract

The structures and stability of single silicon interstitials in their neutral state are investigated via first principles calculations in 3C- and 4H-SiC. By carefully checking the convergence with Brillouin zone (BZ) sampling and supercell size, we explain the disagreement between previous published results and show that the split interstitial along ⟨110⟩ direction and tetrahedrally carbon coordinated structure have competing formation energies in the cubic polytype. A new migration mechanism for the silicon interstitial in the neutral state is presented here, which could be important for the evolution of defect populations in SiC. For 4H-SiC, the most energetically favourable silicon interstitial is found to be the split interstitial configuration ISisp⟨110⟩ but situated in the hexagonal layer. The defect formation energies in 4H-SiC are, in general, larger than those in 3C-SiC, implying that the insertion of silicon interstitial introduces a large lattice distortion to the local coordination environments and affects even the second- or third-nearest neighbours. We also present a comparison between well converged plane-waves calculations and calculations with three localised orbital basis sets; one of them, in spite of providing a reasonable description for bulk properties, is clearly not suitable to describe interstitial defects.