COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE INFLUENCE OF DOPING IONS OF YTTRIUM AND BORON FORMATION OF DEFECTS IN LITHIUM NIOBATE CRYSTALS

Lithium niobate crystals, which are a widely used and highly demanded as nonlinear optical material, are remarkable for their ability to vary a wide range of ferroelectric and nonlinear optical characteristics depending on the type and concentration of the impurity ion, as well as on the Li/Nb ratio. Based on our approach to modeling clusters in the lithium niobate crystal, in which the cluster grows not by unit cells, but by oxygen octahedra, we have carried out a comparative analysis of the features of the incorporation of impurity ions of yttrium and boron with the same charge +3 into the crystal. It is shown that due to the different ionic radii the incorporation proceeds by to two mechanisms. If for yttrium the usual mechanism operates, when the impurity ion is localized inside the oxygen octahedron. The ion of boron, i.e. a nonmetallic element, is incorporated into the tetrahedral voids of the structure, namely, into the oxygen planes forming the octahedron. In this case, the influence of these impurity ions on one of the most important characteristics of lithium niobate turns out to be diametrically opposite: yttrium enhances the photorefractive effect, boron decreases it, which must be taken into account in the direction of targeted use of lithium niobate crystals.