Calculation of the stacking fault energy by using the anisotropic next-nearest neighbor ising model

A stacking fault is a type of extended defect formed in a material. It is known to prohibit the transport of charges in semiconductor materials and promote the recombination of charges; therefore, the performance of electronic devices can be suppressed. For investigating of the stability of stacking faults, first-principles calculations are widely performed, which can be also described using an anisotropic next-nearest-neighbor Ising model (ANNNI) and can be constructed using the total energy of polytypes obtained from the first-principles calculations. In this study, we constructed the ANNNI model for diamond Si and zinc-blende CdTe, ZnS, and GaAs. Our models consider the interactions between two and three layers, resulting in a lower error than the models using only two-layer interactions. The predicted stacking fault energy was similar to that from the first-principles calculations, indicating that the stacking fault energy can be obtained using the ANNNI model.