Abstract
The dielectric relaxation and thermally assisted a.c. conduction play an important role in understanding the conduction mechanism in chalcogenide glasses. These two phenomena are often the deciding factors of the suitability of chalcogenide materials for particular device applications. Dielectric relaxation studies are important to understand the nature and origin of dielectric losses, which, in effect, may be useful in the determination of structure and defects in solids. The study of thermally assisted a.c. conduction can be used as a tool to understand the nature of defect states and the estimation of their density of defect states. In this paper, therefore, we have studied the metal-induced effects of cadmium (Cd), indium (In) and antimony (Sb) on dielectric relaxation and thermally activated a.c. conduction in ternary Se(80)Te(18)Sn(2) glass. The density of charged defect states in quaternary Se(80)Te(8)Sn(2)M(10) alloys is found to vary with the electro-negativity difference (ξ (M) - ξ (Te)) of the foreign element M and Te. Further analysis shows that the increasing sequence of the density of charged defects is explained in terms of variation in the lone-pair electrons after the incorporation of Cd, In and Sb.