Combined experimental-theoretical study of electron mobility-limiting mechanisms in SrSnO3

Abstract

The discovery and development of ultra-wide bandgap (UWBG) semiconductors is crucial to accelerate the adoption of renewable power sources. This necessitates an UWBG semiconductor that exhibits robust doping with high carrier mobility over a wide range of carrier concentrations. Here we demonstrate that epitaxial thin films of the perovskite oxide NdxSr1−xSnO3 (SSO) do exactly this. Nd is used as a donor to successfully modulate the carrier concentration over nearly two orders of magnitude, from 3.7 × 1018 cm−3 to 2.0 × 1020 cm−3. Despite being grown on lattice-mismatched substrates and thus having relatively high structural disorder, SSO films exhibited the highest room-temperature mobility, ~70 cm2 V−1 s−1, among all known UWBG semiconductors in the range of carrier concentrations studied. The phonon-limited mobility is calculated from first principles and supplemented with a model to treat ionized impurity and Kondo scattering. This produces excellent agreement with experiment over a wide range of temperatures and carrier concentrations, and predicts the room-temperature phonon-limited mobility to be 76–99 cm2 V−1 s−1 depending on carrier concentration. This work establishes a perovskite oxide as an emerging UWBG semiconductor candidate with potential for applications in power electronics.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Nov 11, 2021
Source ID
10.1038/s42005-021-00742-w

Entities

People

  • Anil Kumar Rajapitamahuni
  • Bharat Jalan
  • Fengdeng Liu
  • I-te Lu
  • Jin-Jian Zhou
  • Marco Bernardi
  • Thomas E. Mates
  • Tristan K. Truttmann

Organizations

  • Air Force Office of Scientific Research
  • National Science Foundation

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Materials science

Readers

  • Materials Science and Engineering.
  • Semiconductor Device Technology

Technology Areas

  • Microelectronics
  • Microelectronics - Graphene