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Semiconductors are a critically important area of future materials research with great societal benefits. This new IRG will focus on the exploration and development of semiconducting binary oxides (ZnO, Ga2O3, In2O3, SnO2, Cu2O, NiO, TiO2, …) as new wide-band-gap electronic materials. Even with their current high level of impurities and poor microstructures, these oxides already have significant industrial importance. The proposed IRG will mount a concerted and multidisciplinary effort to bring the solid-state physics and materials science of oxides to a new level. Although the technical goal is to enable improved control of physical properties, the scientific goal is to both uncover new physics and realize dramatic improvements in materials properties; thereby spawning novel and innovative applications based on these new insights. The proposed IRG is further motivated by the realization that several binary oxides have potentially excellent semiconductor properties (e.g., very respectable electron mobility in sputtered or ablated films). However, most oxides have neither been grown by the highest purity routes nor received sufficient experimental and theoretical scrutiny to be developed as electronic materials. If successful, this research will allow high purity epitaxial films with controlled doping to be grown leading to a new class of semiconductors with unlimited potential. IRG MEMBERS
IRG AFFILIATES
Plan-View High-Resolution Transmission Electron Microscopy image of (111) Sc2O3 films [S. Stemmer and D. Klenov] 
Dual showerhead injection MOCVD reactor. 
Ball and stick representation of the local atomic relaxations around an oxygen vacancy in ZnO, calculated with density functional theory [A. Janotti and C. G. Van de Walle, Appl. Phys. Lett. 87, 122102 (2005)]. |
