Influence of deuteration on the KH2PO4 crystal micro-defects characterization by using positron annihilation spectroscopy

Abstract

Deuterated potassium dihydrogen phosphate (K(DxH1-x) 2PO4) crystals with different deuteration levels (x=0, 0.51, 0.85) were grown by conventional cooling method from deuterated solutions at Shandong University. Positron annihilation spectroscopy has been widely used to the study on micro-defects of semiconductors and other materials, which is very sensitive to the crystal structure, defect types, defect concentrations, and so on. In this paper, positron annihilation spectroscopies (positron annihilation lifetime spectroscopy and Doppler broadening spectroscopy), combined with X-ray diffraction (XRD) are used to investigate micro-defects characterization in K(DxH1-x) 2PO4 crystals. Influences of deuteration degree on the crystal structure characteristics, defect types and concentrations are discussed. It can be concluded from XRD experiments that the lattice parameters of a and b increase with the increase in deuteration levels, while no obvious change occurs on the lattice parameter c. KH2PO4(KDP) crystals at low deuteration level and high deuteration level could be regarded as low deuterium-doped KDP crystal and low hydrogen-doped DKDP crystal respectively. It is indicated that the higher the replacement ratio in the crystals, the weaker the diffraction peak they show. Positron annihilation lifetimes increase clearly in the highly-deuterated KDP crystals. It is found that neutral interstitial defects and oxygen defects in the KDP crystal increase with increasing deuteration degree. And these types of defects can be attributed to lattice distortion effect. From positron annihilation lifetime results we can arrive at another conclusion that the compound defects will form and defects concentration is declined, when hydrogen vacancies, K vacancies and substitutional impurity defects continue to react by means of association reactions. These phenomena suggest that high deuteration plays a significant role in promoting association reaction of internal defects in the crystals. Furthermore, the polymerization reaction of the clusters and micro-cavities continue to occur, therefore defect concentrations will show a constant decrease. Doppler broadening spectra show that the internal defects in the crystals increase integrally with an increase of deuteration level; this agrees well with the results of positron annihilation lifetime. Moreover, Doppler broadening spectra indicate that the proportional change of these defects is synchronous and consistent with the actuality. To sum up, our experimental results suggest that the defect reaction is weak in low degree of KDP crystal deuteration growth (less than 50%), while reaction is enhanced in the high degree of deuteration growth (higher than 50%).