Off-center defects in crystals revisited: dynamic features

TL;DR

This paper reviews the dynamic behavior of off-center defects in crystals, emphasizing their vibronic origins and extending the concepts to other physics fields like nuclear matter, highlighting their universal nature.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive survey of off-center defect dynamics and introduces a novel extension of vibronic effects to nuclear physics systems.

Findings

Off-center displacements are driven by vibronic effects.

Dynamic features include rotation-like reorientation of defects.

The concepts are extendable to nuclear matter through energy rescaling.

Abstract

A survey is presented of the dynamic features of non-itinerant off-center defects in crystals, such as rotation-like reorientation of isolated species by either impurity or host ions. The occurrence of off-center displacements in electron-vibrational mode systems is regarded as due to the vibronic effects. It is extendable to systems in other fields of physics, e.g. nuclear matter. The latter extension is found to be effective through re-scaling of energies and separations.