Comparison of the Koster-Slater and the equation-of-motion method for calculation of the electronic structure of defects in compound semiconductors

Traditional methods of calculating the electronic structure of defects in semiconductors rely on matrix-diagonalization methods which use the unperturbed crystalline wave functions as a basis. Equation-of-motion (EOM) methods, on the other hand, give excellent results with strong disorder and many defects and make no use of the basis of unperturbed wave functions, but require self-averaging properties of the wave functions which appear superficially to make them unsuitable for study of local properties. We show here that EOM methods are better than traditional methods for calculating the electronic structure of essentially any finite-range impurity potential. The reason is basically that the numerical cost of the traditional Greens-function methods grows approximately as R7 o/Iper sitet/P, where R is the range of the potential, whereas the cost of the EOM methods per site is independent of the range of the potential. Our detailed calculations on a model of an oxygen vacancy in rutile TiO2 show that a crossover occurs very soon, so that equation-of-motion methods are better than the traditional ones in the case of potentials of realistic range.