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Acknowledgement
This website is the result of a collaboration between research groups in the Department of Physics at Case Western Reserve University's College of Arts and Sciences and The Ohio State University, College of Engineering, supported through the NSF grant DMREF-1533957.
Mission
We aim to be an easily accessed, comprehensive and up-to-date repository for information on the fundamental properties of the pure II-IV-N2 compounds, their alloys and heterostructures, in order to help accelerate the development of this interesting family of materials.
Readers are invited to contribute information on this website by contacting our group.
An Introduction to the Heterovalent Ternary Nitrides
The heterovalent ternary nitrides are attracting increasing interest. Expanding the nitride family to include the II-IV-N2 compounds and their alloys opens up many possibilities for band structure and device engineering, and for new physics in this more complex family. For example, ZnSnN2, composed entirely of abundant, nontoxic, inexpensive elements, has gained attention for its potential for solar photovoltaics. ZnGeN2 is closely lattice-matched to and has a band gap similar to that of GaN, but a large band offset for the two materials is predicted. This large band offset may be used to design novel optoelectronic devices.
The stable phase of many of the II-IV-nitrides is one of two possible orthorhombic lattices that are both closely related to the wurtzite structure of the binary nitride semiconductors. For both orthorhombic lattices, in the ground state the nitrogen atoms are each bonded to two group II and two group IV cations, thus preserving the octet rule. Octet-rule-preserving polytypes and disordered forms obtained by stacking these two structures along one dimension in a random order are also possible.
A detailed description of these structures and the associated choices of axes and nomenclature is given in the section Crystal Structures. (see side bar). The structure and known properties of each ternary compound available or predicted today, alloys obtained by mixing various group II or group IV elements and heterostructures among these materials and with the binary nitrides are described in separate sections.
Acknowledgement
This website is the result of a collaboration between research groups in the Department of Physics at Case Western Reserve University's College of Arts and Sciences and The Ohio State University, College of Engineering, supported through the NSF grant DMREF-1533957.
Mission
We aim to be an easily accessed, comprehensive and up-to-date repository for information on the fundamental properties of the pure II-IV-N2 compounds, their alloys and heterostructures, in order to help accelerate the development of this interesting family of materials.
Readers are invited to contribute information on this website by contacting our group.
An Introduction to the Heterovalent Ternary Nitrides
The heterovalent ternary nitrides are attracting increasing interest. Expanding the nitride family to include the II-IV-N2 compounds and their alloys opens up many possibilities for band structure and device engineering, and for new physics in this more complex family. For example, ZnSnN2, composed entirely of abundant, nontoxic, inexpensive elements, has gained attention for its potential for solar photovoltaics. ZnGeN2 is closely lattice-matched to and has a band gap similar to that of GaN, but a large band offset for the two materials is predicted. This large band offset may be used to design novel optoelectronic devices.
The stable phase of many of the II-IV-nitrides is one of two possible orthorhombic lattices that are both closely related to the wurtzite structure of the binary nitride semiconductors. For both orthorhombic lattices, in the ground state the nitrogen atoms are each bonded to two group II and two group IV cations, thus preserving the octet rule. Octet-rule-preserving polytypes and disordered forms obtained by stacking these two structures along one dimension in a random order are also possible.
A detailed description of these structures and the associated choices of axes and nomenclature is given in the section Crystal Structures. (see side bar). The structure and known properties of each ternary compound available or predicted today, alloys obtained by mixing various group II or group IV elements and heterostructures among these materials and with the binary nitrides are described in separate sections.