Hobbis et al (Inorg. Chem.,2019, 58 (3), pp 1826–1833) thoroughly examined the properties of aniobium-iron-antimony semiconductor material. Although theirreported synthetic procedure was a fairly straightforwardstoichiometric melting and subsequent crystallization of the pureelements, they did not observe the predicted behavior of anintrinsic semiconductor. Instead, their compound was found toexhibit characteristics of a very lightly n-doped semiconductorinstead. They hypothesize that this is due to the formation ofso-called “antiphase domains†during crystallization, where thelocal pattern of atoms in small regions in the solid is the exactreverse of the rest of the crystal structure. Given the threeelements involved, suggest an explanation (using a diagram if youfind it helpful) for how this change in atomic pattern gives riseto n-type doping behavior.
