Crystal structure, electronic structure, and optical properties of the novel LiCdGeS, a wide-bandgap quaternary sulfide with a polar structure derived from lonsdaleite.

The novel quaternary thiogermanate LiCdGeS (tetralithium cadmium digermanium heptasulfide) was discovered from a solid-state reaction at 750 °C. Single-crystal X-ray diffraction data were collected and used to solve and refine the structure. LiCdGeS is a member of the small, but growing, class of I-II-IV-VI diamond-like materials. The compound adopts the CuSiS structure type, which is a derivative of lonsdaleite. Crystallizing in the polar space group Cc, LiCdGeS contains 14 crystallographically unique ions, all residing on general positions. Like all diamond-like structures, the compound is built of corner-sharing tetrahedral units that create a relatively dense three-dimensional assembly. The title compound is the major phase of the reaction product, as evidenced by powder X-ray diffraction and optical diffuse reflectance spectroscopy. While the compound exhibits a second-harmonic generation (SHG) response comparable to that of the AgGaS (AGS) reference material in the IR region, its laser-induced damage threshold (LIDT) is over an order of magnitude greater than AGS for λ = 1.064 µm and τ = 30 ps. Bond valence sums, global instability index, minimum bounding ellipsoid (MBE) analysis, and electronic structure calculations using density functional theory (DFT) were used to further evaluate the crystal structure and electronic structure of the compound and provide a comparison with the analogous I-II-IV-VI diamond-like compound LiCdGeS. LiCdGeS appears to be a better IR nonlinear optical (NLO) candidate than LiCdGeS and one of the most promising contenders to date. The exceptional LIDT is likely due, at least in part, to the wider optical bandgap of ∼3.6 eV.