Publications
Surface effects in semiconductor interstitial formation energies
In this work, we examine the formation energies of interstitials in semiconductors obtained with four different pure functionals. Explicitely we investigate three silicon self-interstitials. All functionals give the same trend among those interstitials; the lowest energy being for formation of the <110>-split, somewhat higher energy for the formation of the hexagonal interstitial, while highest energy among the three is obtained for the meta-stable tetragonal configuration. However, the value for the formation energy for a specific interstitial differs substantially in calculations using different functionals. It is shown that the main contribution to these differences is stemming from the functionals different surface intrinsic errors. We also discuss the puzzle that the values obtained with the surface intrisic error free AM05 functional (Armiento and Mattsson, Phys. Rev. B 72, 085108 (2006)) gives values substantially lower than Quantum Monte Carlo results