Berlin 2018 – scientific programme

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MM: Fachverband Metall- und Materialphysik

MM 64: Focus Session: Frontiers of Electronic-Structure Theory: Correlated Electron Materials VII (joint session O/TT/MM/DS/CPP)

MM 64.8: Talk

Thursday, March 15, 2018, 17:00–17:15, HL 001

Oxygen vacancy-induced absorption of visible light in SrNbO3 — •Marcello Turtulici, Steffen Backes, and Silke Biermann — Centre de Physique Théorique, Ecole Polytechnique, 91128 Palaiseau, France

SrNbO3 has recently attracted attention as a bright red photocatalyst. Several, mutually contradicting, models have been proposed in the literature in order to explain the strong absorption in the visible spectrum, and no consensus even on the basic nature of the mechanism has been reached. In this work we investigate the optical properties of this material by means of state-of-the-art Density Functional Theory and many-body perturbation theory techniques. We evidence a high sensitivity of the optical properties on deviations from the ideal crystal structure. In particular, the optical properties should strongly depend on the presence of oxygen vacancies, which give rise to additional absorption channels in the visible frequency range. Most notably, the experimentally observed red color is likely due to transitions between orbitals of dominant Nb-eg character, which are enhanced by the strong hybridization of the quite extended 4d-states of Nb with oxygen p-states.