First Principles Study of Tritium Diffusion in Li₂TiO₃ Crystal with Lithium Vacancy

Li₂TiO₃ is one of the most significant breeder materials and has potential applications in future fusion reactors. Defect models with three types of lithium vacancies were considered to study the diffusion behavior of tritium in Li₂TiO₃ by the density functional theory calculations. The possible tritium adsorption sites inside the lithium vacancy were examined and analyzed. The energy barrier of all diffusion paths between different adsorption sites was calculated and the minimum energy barrier is about 0.45 eV, which indicates that the tritium atom diffuses freely inside the lithium vacancy; when a tritium diffuses across the crystal in the typical three directions, our results reveal that the tritium atom prefers to move along the [010] direction. Furthermore, we found that the minimum energy barrier for the tritium atom to escape the trap of Li vacancy is 0.76 eV. After the tritium jumping out of the Li vacancy, the minimum energy barrier is 0.5 eV for the tritium atom diffusing in the crystal. Therefore, we predict that tritium can easily escape from the trap of the Li vacancy and then diffuse across the crystal. Such results are beneficial to the tritium release process in Li₂TiO₃ and could provide theoretical guidance for the future applications of the Li₂TiO₃ materials.