Twin Boundaries in Zinc Oxide with Additions of Gallium Oxide

Twin boundaries (TBs) in ZnO sintered with small additions of Ga₂O₃ have been characterized with advanced methods of transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The TBs and accompanying inversion domain boundaries are on {011¯3} planes of ZnO. The Ga content of the TB corresponds to an effectively half occupied {011¯3} plane determined from compositional maps calculated from electron spectroscopic images using electron filtering TEM. The structure of the TBs were investigated by high-resolution TEM, and images of focus series were used to reconstruct the complex electron wave. Simulated electron waves based on structure models of the TB were quantitatively compared with the reconstructed wave to identify and to refine atom positions. The twins can be considered to be created by a mirror operation on a {011¯3} plane of ZnO, and two alternating closed-packed polyhedral clusters of oxygen ions can be identified as building units of the TB structure. Unit 1 is occupied with Zn²⁺ by simply continuing ZnO₄ tetrahedra of the same type from both crystals to the TB. Using arguments of local charge balance unit 2 can only be occupied with the trivalent Ga³⁺ ion. The Ga³⁺ position was refined with high precision (±5 pm), and the resulting polyhedron is a GaO₅ square pyramid. The pyramids form densely occupied columns parallel to the twin axis 21¯1¯0]. The analysis of the TB structure yields a fractional occupancy of the boundary plane by Ga of 0.5, which is in good agreement with the result of the chemical composition measurement with energy filtered TEM.