Defects in Solids

by Dr Manish Jain (Univ. of California, Berkeley, USA)

Thursday 17 May 2012, 14:30 → 15:30 Asia/Kolkata

A304 (Colaba Campus)

In this talk, I will discuss first principles methods for understanding and predicting ground and excited-state phenomenon in materials. In particular, I will talk about the physics of defects in solids and discuss in detail two different kind of defects. The first defect I will discuss are oxygen-related point defects in hafnia. Hafnia is a high-k dielectric material used as a gate dielectric in todays MOSFETs. Oxygen-related point defects are believed to responsible for device performance issues in modern MOSFETs. I will present our results on the stability of various oxygen-related point defects in hafnia. The second defect I will discuss is the negatively charged nitrogen vacancy center in diamond. This defect is the leading candidate for realization of individually addressable spins in the solid state for quantum computing under ambient conditions. This is because, this defect can be optically initialized from its ground state into an un-entangled spin state. I will discuss our results on the electronic structure of the negatively charged nitrogen vacancy center and put forward a concrete optical initialization mechanism.