Ab initio calculations of neutral and charged impurity centers of manganese and chromium in strontium titanate

This paper presents the results of ab initio calculations of the equilibrium geometry, the electronic structure, and the spin and charge densities for neutral and negatively charged defects produced by the Mn and Cr impurities in the B position of the SrTiO₃ structure. It has been shown that, in both cases, the neutral defect is an acceptor center, while the singly charged defect is a donor center. It has been found that doubly charged defects are polar, have the symmetry C _4v, and reside in the ionic configurations ⁵Mn³⁺ + ³Ti³⁺ and ⁴Cr³⁺ + ³Ti³⁺, respectively. In each case, there is a pair of almost energy-degenerate electronic states (⁴ B ₁ and ⁶ B ₁ for Mn and ³ A ₁ and ⁵ A ₁ for Cr), which differ only in the direction of the spin of the electron polaron localized at one of the neighboring titanium atoms. For the manganese impurity, the energy of the polar state ⁶ B ₁ is only 0.174 eV lower than that of the state ⁶ A _1g (O _h ) with the Mn²⁺ ion in the high-spin state. A new mechanism of dielectric relaxation in STO: Mn has been proposed.