Kyma Technologies Inc of Raleigh, NC, USA, which provides crystalline gallium nitride (GaN) and aluminum nitride (AlN) materials and related products and services, says that it has helped Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) scientists demonstrate a novel approach to making mid-infrared (mid-IR) non-linear optics (key for a number of commercial and defense applications).
Kyma says that, currently, the most prevalent approaches to non-linear mid-IR optical materials are based on periodically poled lithium niobate and related materials, which suffer from a dramatic drop-off in performance in the wavelength region beyond 4 microns. NRL’s approach is dramatically different — alternating the actual crystal orientation of the semiconducting nonlinear material — to create promising structures from GaN grown by hydride vapor phase epitaxy (HVPE).
Kyma says that its HVPE GaN has very low impurity levels and low defect densities which supports a large transparency window all the way to 7 microns, a high thermal conductivity (>250W/m-K), and a high second-order nonlinear susceptibility (all important for non-linear optics applications).
