Effects of hole localization on limiting p-type conductivity in oxide and nitride semiconductors

We examine how hole localization limits the effectiveness of substitutional acceptors in oxide and nitride semiconductors and explain why p-type doping of these materials has proven so difficult. Using hybrid density functional calculations, we find that anion-site substitutional impurities in AlN, GaN, InN, and ZnO lead to atomic-like states that localize on the impurity atom itself. Substitution with cation-site impurities, on the other hand, triggers the formation of polarons that become trapped on nearest-neighbor anions, generally leading to large ionization energies for these acceptors. Unlike shallow effective-mass acceptors, these two types of deep acceptors couple strongly with the lattice, significantly affecting the optical properties and severely limiting prospects for achieving p-type conductivity in these wide-band-gap materials.