Lattice site specific diffusion properties for substitutional and interstitial impurity atoms in ZnO crystals

Abstract

Fundamental understanding of impurity diffusion in crystals remains a challenge due to lack of experimental capabilities for measuring the diffusion properties of atoms according to their substitutional and interstitial lattice locations. With examples of indium and silver in ZnO crystals, we demonstrate an ion beam based method to experimentally determine the energetics and entropy changes in diffusion of substitutional and interstitial impurity atoms. While the interstitial Ag diffuses much faster than the substitutional Ag, as normally expected, the interstitial In migrates slower than the substitutional In, which is attributed to a large negative entropy change (∼−10 kB), possibly caused by the large atomic size of In. The activation energy and the diffusivity pre-exponential factor for the interstitial Ag are significantly enhanced, being more than a factor of two and ∼13 orders of magnitude, respectively, relative to the case for the interstitial In. This implies two different diffusion mechanisms between these two types of interstitial atoms in ZnO crystals: the direct interstitial diffusion mechanism for the interstitial In and the kick-out diffusion mechanism for the interstitial Ag. In addition, the activation energies and the diffusivity prefactors follow the Meyer-Neldel relationship with an excitation energy of ∼92 meV.