Modelling isolated hydrogen impurity in Lu₂O₃ with muonium spectroscopy

¹ CFisUC, Department of Physics, University of Coimbra, R. Larga, P-3004-516 Coimbra, Portugal
² CICECO - Aveiro Institute of Materials, Department of Chemistry, University of Aveiro, 3810-193 Aveiro, Portugal
³ Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie, 14109 Berlin, Germany
⁴ Department of Physics, Texas Tech University, Lubbock TX 79409-1051, USA
⁵ Department of Physics, Northern Michigan University, Marquette, MI, 49855
⁶ Department of Physics and Engineering, Francis Marion University, Florence, SC 29502, USA
⁷ ISIS Facility, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Chilton, Didcot, Oxon OX11 0QX, United Kingdom

^* Corresponding author: ruivilao@uc.pt

Published online: 16 April 2020

Abstract

We identified in this experiment two muon configurations in Lu₂O₃, the oxygen-bound (O-Mu⁺) ground state and a metastable (energy barrier 0.7(3) eV) atom-like excited state. These configurations are partially not formed immediately after implantation but somewhat delayed due to the requirement of a lattice rearrangement around the muon. These rearrangement processes occur on a timescale of ns to µs and are thus observable in µSR experiments. A special role plays a fairly long-lived (ns to µs) transition state as an intermediate step in the reaction process.