Efficient and improved prediction of the band offsets at semiconductor heterojunctions from meta-GGA density functionals

TL;DR

This paper evaluates advanced meta-GGA density functionals for predicting band offsets at semiconductor heterojunctions, demonstrating they offer a computationally efficient and accurate alternative to more demanding GW calculations.

Contribution

The study systematically assesses several meta-GGA functionals, showing they can reliably predict band offsets, improving computational efficiency over traditional GW methods.

Findings

Meta-GGA functionals perform well compared to GW calculations.

Band offsets can be accurately estimated using ionization potentials and electron affinities.

Meta-GGA functionals provide a cost-effective approach for heterostructure analysis.

Abstract

Accurate theoretical prediction of the band offsets at interfaces of semiconductor heterostructures can often be quite challenging. Although density functional theory has been reasonably successful to carry out such calculations and efficient and accurate semilocal functionals are desirable to reduce the computational cost. In general, the semilocal functionals based on the generalized gradient approximation (GGA) significantly underestimate the bulk band gaps. This, in turn, results in inaccurate estimates of the band offsets at the heterointerfaces. In this paper, we investigate the performance of several advanced meta-GGA functionals in the computational prediction of band offsets at semiconductor heterojunctions. In particular, we investigate the performance of r2SCAN (revised strongly-constrained and appropriately-normed functional), rMGGAC (revised semilocal functional based on cuspless hydrogen model and Pauli kinetic energy density functional), mTASK (modified Aschebrock and K\"ummel meta-GGA functional), and LMBJ (local modified Becke-Johnson) exchange-correlation functionals. Our results strongly suggest that these meta-GGA functionals for supercell calculations perform quite well, especially, when compared to computationally more demanding GW calculations. We also present band offsets calculated using ionization potentials and electron affinities, as well as band alignment via the branch point energies. Overall, our study shows that the aforementioned meta-GGA functionals can be used within the DFT framework to estimate the band offsets in semiconductor heterostructures with predictive accuracy.