Experimental evidence of the hybridization of the electron states of an impurity and the conduction band in the HgSe:Fe system

X-ray absorption spectra from iron donor impurities in mercury selenide have been analyzed in a concentration range where the Fermi energy of conduction electrons is close to the energy of the donor d level. At high impurity concentrations, the resulting spectrum corresponds to the completely filled donor state and coincides with the spectrum of a bivalent iron ion. A transition to an intermediate-filling state is observed with decreasing the concentration. The spectra are quantitatively analyzed in a model implying the existence of a mixture of ions that contain and do not contain a donor electron in a bound state. It has been found that such a model is significantly inconsistent with the experimental data. It has been shown that the concentration dependence of the x-ray spectra corresponds to the manifestation of the significant hybridization of localized and delocalized donor electron states in the conduction band. (c) 2005 Pleiades Publishing, Inc.