Temperature dependent behavior of localized and delocalized electrons in nitrogen-doped 6H SiC crystals as studied by electron spin resonance

TL;DR

This study investigates how temperature affects the ESR spectra of nitrogen donors in 6H SiC crystals, revealing electron ionization processes and conduction electron behavior with implications for material conductivity.

Contribution

It provides new insights into the temperature-dependent ionization and ESR characteristics of nitrogen donors in 6H SiC, including the identification of conduction electrons and their activation energies.

Findings

Conduction electron ESR signals emerge above 80 K due to donor ionization.

Hyperfine splitting decreases with temperature, indicating motion narrowing.

Different donor energy levels are involved in electron ionization depending on the crystal growth method.

Abstract

We have studied the temperature behavior of the electron spin resonance (ESR) spectra of nitrogen (N) donors in n-type 6H SiC crystals grown by Lely and sublimation sandwich methods (SSM) with donor concentration of 10^17 cm^(-3) at T=60-150 K. A broad signal in the ESR spectrum was observed at T>=80 K with Lorentzian lineshape and gpar=2.0043(3), gper=2.0030(3), which was previously assigned in the literature to the N donors in the 1s(E) excited state. Based on the analysis of the ESR lineshape, linewidth and g-tensor we attribute this signal to the conduction electrons (CE). The emergence of the CE ESR signal at T>80 K was explained by the ionization of electrons from the 1s(A) ground and 1s(E) excited states of N donors to the conduction band while the observed reduction of the hyperfine (hf) splitting for the Nk1,k2 donors with the temperature increase is attributed to the motion narrowing effect of the hf splitting. The temperature dependence of CE ESR linewidth is described by an exponential law (Orbach process) with the activation energy corresponding to the energy separation between 1s(A1) and 1s(E) energy levels for N residing at quasi-cubic sites (Nk1,k2). The theoretical analysis of the temperature dependence of microwave conductivity measured by the contact-free method shows that due to the different position of the Fermi level in two samples the ionization of free electrons occurs from the energy levels of Nk1,k2 donors in Lely grown samples and from the energy level of Nh residing at hexagonal position in 6H SiC grown by SSM