Tungsten oxides. I. Effects of oxygen vacancies and doping on electronic and optical properties of different phases of WO3

In this part we present results of our ab initio calculations indicating that dispersion of the bands near the gap region for different phases of WO3 (namely, epsilon-WO3, delta-WO3, gamma-WO3, beta-WO3, orth-WO3, alpha-WO3, and hex-WO3) is rather close. The rapid increase in the absorption coefficient starts at the lower energy range for alpha-WO3 and hex-WO3 than for the other phases in accordance with the calculated band gaps. An oxygen vacancy has turned out to decrease the gap by 0.50 eV and to shift the absorption coefficient to the lower energy range in the room temperature gamma-WO3 phase. We have also traced changes caused by molybdenum and sulfur doping of gamma-WO3. Only sulfur doped gamma-WO3 has been revealed to display the formation of the impurity band along with a sizable reduction in the gap and the shift in the absorption coefficient to the lower energy range. (C) 2010 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3505688]