Investigations on the g factors of the ground and excited states for Cu²⁺ ions in ZnO crystal

Abstract

The g factors g _// and g _⊥ of the ground Γ₆(² T ₂) and excited Γ_4,5(² E), Γ₆(² E) states for trigonal Cu²⁺ centres in ZnO crystals are calculated from three theoretical methods, the complete diagonalization (of the energy matrix) method, the second-order perturbation method (PTM-I) and the simplified second-order perturbation method (PTM-II, this method was described in an earlier paper). These methods are based on the cluster approach in which the spin-orbit coupling parameters ζ, ζ′ and the orbital reduction factors k, k′ are calculated from a semi-empirical molecular orbital method. The crystal-field parameters used in the calculations are obtained from the superposition model and so the defect structure of Cu²⁺ centres in ZnO can be acquired. The calculated g factors from the three methods are in reasonable agreement with the experimental values and the defect structure of Cu²⁺ centres in ZnO is acquired. It appears that in some cases the approximate PTM can be applied in the studies of g factors of various states. The conditions that the PTM are ineffective are discussed.

Keywords:

• Zeeman effect
• crystal-field theory
• optical spectroscopy
• electron paramagnetic resonance
• ZnO:Cu²⁺