Temperature behavior of the conduction electrons in the nitrogen-doped 3C SiC monocrystals as studied by electron spin resonance

Abstract

The temperature behavior of the electron spin resonance (ESR) spectra of nitrogen donors in n-type bulk 3C SiC monocrystals with (ND − NA) ≈ 1017 cm−3 was studied at T = 10–50 K. The triplet lines due to the hyperfine (hf) interaction with 14N nuclei (I = 1, 99.6%) along with a single line with similar isotropic g values of 2.0050(3) were observed in the ESR spectrum of n-type 3C SiC monocrystals in the temperature interval from 10 to 35 K. The observed reduction of the hf splitting for the nitrogen donor residing cubic position (Nk) in the temperature interval from 15 to 35 K was attributed to the motion narrowing effect of the hf splitting. With further increase of the temperature up to 35 K, only one single line with a Lorentzian lineshape was observed in the ESR spectrum of n-type 3C SiC, which was previously assigned in the literature to the unknown deeper donor center. Based on the temperature behavior of the ESR linewidth, integral intensity, and g-value, we have attributed this signal to the conduction electrons (CEs). The temperature dependence of the CE ESR linewidth was described by an exponential law (Orbach process) with the value of the activation energy ΔE ≈ 40 meV close to the energy separation between 1 s(E) excited energy level and conduction band for nitrogen donors. The nitrogen donor pairs were found in the ESR spectrum of n-type 3C SiC. The electrical characteristics of 3C SiC sample were studied by using the contact-free microwave conductivity. The energy ionization of nitrogen donor Ei = 51.4 meV was obtained from the fitting of the experimental data with the theory.