An interdisciplinary team at the US Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) has received the Japan Society of Applied Physics’ 2014 Outstanding Paper Award.
The award is only given to a select group of papers that present excellent achievement in applied physics and are published in the last 24 months in Japan Society of Applied Physics journals, with fewer than 10 papers selected out of about 6300.
The paper describes NRL research that resulted in the first-time synthesis of large-area, high-quality gallium nitride (GaN) on graphene, the latter being previously formed on a wafer of semiconducting silicon carbide (SiC).
“This is the first-ever demonstration of epitaxy of a conventional semiconductor on an ‘inert’ two-dimensional material,” claims NRL’s Dr Charles Eddy, a materials engineer who heads the research team. “Inert 2D materials, such as graphene, do not have out-of-plane bonds to permit epitaxial growth of materials. Here, we’ve combined a gentle, but temperature-sensitive modification to the surface of the 2D material and a recently developed low-temperature epitaxial growth process to overcome this limitation,” he adds. “The ability to combine new 2D materials and conventional semiconductors with high-quality interfaces opens up many opportunities for new electronic devices.”
Eddy describes that the initial vision for the structures they have created is for use in transistors that could operate in the terahertz frequency range for various RF applications including communications and sensing.
Looking ahead, the research team continues to develop both 2D materials and the low-temperature epitaxial growth process (atomic layer epitaxy) to explore more advanced device structures for electronic and optoelectronic applications.
The members of the interdisciplinary team are: Drs Neeraj Nepal (first author), Virginia D. Wheeler, Travis J. Anderson, Michael A. Mastro, Rachael L. Myers-Ward, Jaime A. Freitas Jr, D. Kurt Gaskill and Francis J. Kub from the Electronics Science and Technology Division (ESTD); Dr Syed B Qadri from the Materials Science and Technology Division; Drs Sandra C. (Hernandez) Hangarter and Scott G. Walton from the Plasma Physics Division; and Dr Luke O. Nyakiti (a former postdoc in ESTD, now faculty at Texas A&M University).
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