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β-Ga2O3, an emerging wide bandgap semiconductor material, holds significant potential for various applications. However, challenges persist in improving the crystal quality and achieving controllable doping of β-Ga2O3. In particular, the relationship between these factors and the mechanisms behind them are not fully understood. Molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) is viewed as one of the most sophisticated techniques for growing high-quality crystalline films. It also provides a platform for studying the effects of doping and defects in heteroepitaxial β-Ga2O3. In our study, we tackled the issue of Si source passivation during the MBE growth of Si-doped β-Ga2O3. We did this by using an electron beam vaporize module, a departure from the traditional Si effusion cell. Our research extensively explores the correlation between Si doping concentration and film properties. These properties include microstructure, morphology, defects, carrier conductivity, and mobility. The results from these investigations are mutually supportive and indicate that a high density of defects in heteroepitaxial β-Ga2O3 is the primary reason for the challenges in controllable doping and conductivity. These insights are valuable for the ongoing development and enhancement of β-Ga2O3-based device techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The integration of complex oxides with a wide spectrum of functionalities on Si, Ge and flexible substrates is highly demanded for functional devices in information technology. We demonstrate the remote epitaxy of BaTiO3 (BTO) on Ge using a graphene intermediate layer, which forms a prototype of highly heterogeneous epitaxial systems. The Ge surface orientation dictates the outcome of remote epitaxy. Single crystalline epitaxial BTO3-δ films were grown on graphene/Ge (011), whereas graphene/Ge (001) led to textured films. The graphene plays an important role in surface passivation. The remote epitaxial deposition of BTO3-δ follows the Volmer-Weber growth mode, with the strain being partially relaxed at the very beginning of the growth. Such BTO3-δ films can be easily exfoliated and transferred to arbitrary substrates like Si and flexible polyimide. The transferred BTO3-δ films possess enhanced flexoelectric properties with a gauge factor of as high as 1127. These results not only expand the understanding of heteroepitaxy, but also open a pathway for the applications of devices based on complex oxides.

The effect of high temperature annealing under O2 and N2 atmospheres on the electrical properties and defect formation on Sn doped n-type β-Ga2O3 bulk samples was investigated by electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectroscopy. EPR, being a volume sensitive technique, probes the entire sample volume. Our results show an electrical compensation being correlated with the formation of a negatively charged Ga vacancy defect VGa2−. This VGa center is different from the one observed after particle irradiation. The associated shift of the Fermi level reveals the presence of Fe3+, Cu2+, and Cr3+, which are residuals related to the growth conditions. The 1100 °C N2 annealed sample is fully compensated, and the neutral donor resonance is no longer observed. Our results directly confirm the thermal instability of Ga and Sn in n-type conducting samples. No oxygen vacancy related centers were detected. We discuss the various Ga vacancy centers reported previously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whispering gallery mode (WGM) laser with single‐mode is important for optoelectronic applications because of the higher stability during the light signal transmission. But till now, for InGaN‐based WGM laser, most reports of lasing behavior are multimode lasing. To achieve single‐mode WGM laser, an InGaN‐based micro‐ring laser is proposed and demonstrated with lateral nanoporous distributed Bragg reflector (DBR), where the high‐order lasing modes are strongly suppressed. The side mode suppression ratio (SMSR) is more than 9 times larger than that of the micro‐disk laser with the same radius. Combined with FDTD simulation, the results show that the enhancements are originated from the suppression of the high‐order resonant mode because of the inner boundary of micro‐ring. This work provides a new solution to achieve stable single‐mode WGM laser for future photonic integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The heterogeneous epitaxial system of BaTiO3/Ge (BTO/Ge) is of great interest for both fundamental research and device applications, thanks to its quasi-lattice-matching feature and the integration of functional oxides on semiconductors. Currently, the heteroepitaxial growth of crystalline BTO films on Ge includes the utilization of ultrahigh vacuum tools and complex surface passivation pre-treatment as well as careful control of oxygen partial pressure during the growth. Meanwhile, oxygen vacancies in oxides strongly impact their structural and electrical properties. Here, we report a facile method to directly grow single crystalline BTO films on Ge using pulsed laser deposition. The strict control of oxygen partial pressure ensures a sharp interface with an atom-to-atom registry and also leads to the oxygen-deficient characteristics of BTO. The epitaxial relationship of BTO and Ge is [110] BTO (001)//[100] Ge (001). Detailed crystallographic studies on BTO films with different thicknesses show that, for the films with a thickness less than 20 nm, BTO shows a mixture of tetragonal and cubic phases due to the oxygen vacancies and the strain from the Ge substrate and the cubic phase eventually dominates as the film thickness increases. Such oxygen-deficient BTO films reveal conducting characteristics rather than dielectric properties. The oxygen vacancies can be partly "cured" after a low temperature annealing process. These results not only demonstrate the possibility to directly grow single crystalline oxides on semiconductors without surface passivation but also highlight the importance of oxygen vacancies and lattice strain on the crystallographic and electrical properties of BTO films. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discovery of high mobility p-type two-dimensional beta-tellurite (β-TeO2) has led to an increasing interest in tellurium oxide-related polymorphs. Bulk TeO2 is known to exist in three polymorphs (α-, β-, and γ-TeO2), all of which exhibit wide bandgaps. By utilizing the interfacial interactions, we successfully synthesized a new polymorph of TeO2 with a rutile structure on a tetragonal FeTe surface via soft surface oxidation. Irrespective of the film thickness, the rutile TeO2 exhibited a metallic Fermi surface, as revealed by low-temperature scanning tunneling spectroscopy and further confirmed by our theoretical calculations. Striped wrinkles with an apparent lattice shift were observed on large rutile TeO2 monolayer islands due to lattice distortion. The density of states around the Fermi level accordingly shift from a U-shaped gap to a V-shaped feature. Our synthesis and observation of rutile TeO2, based on interface engineering and in situ tunneling spectroscopy, can help tune the electronic properties of tellurium oxide in reduced dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The integration of complex oxides with a wide spectrum of functionalities on Si, Ge and flexible substrates is highly demanded for functional devices in information technology. We demonstrate the remote epitaxy of BaTiO3 (BTO) on Ge using a graphene intermediate layer, which forms a prototype of highly heterogeneous epitaxial systems. The Ge surface orientation dictates the outcome of remote epitaxy. Single crystalline epitaxial BTO3-δ films were grown on graphene/Ge (011), whereas graphene/Ge (001) led to textured films. The graphene plays an important role in surface passivation. The remote epitaxial deposition of BTO3-δ follows the Volmer-Weber growth mode, with the strain being partially relaxed at the very beginning of the growth. Such BTO3-δ films can be easily exfoliated and transferred to arbitrary substrates like Si and flexible polyimide. The transferred BTO3-δ films possess enhanced flexoelectric properties with a gauge factor of as high as 1127. These results not only expand the understanding of heteroepitaxy, but also open a pathway for the applications of devices based on complex oxides. The integration of epitaxial complex oxides on semiconductor and flexible substrates is required but challenging. Here, the authors report the highly heterogeneous epitaxy of transferrable BaTiO3-δ membrane with enhanced flexoelectricity on Ge (011). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High performance β–Ga2O3 trench Schottky barrier diodes (SBDs) were demonstrated with the employment of a novel etching technique called self-reactive etching (SRE). Owing to the high-quality surface without any etched damages and impurities, the β–Ga2O3 trench SBDs showed temperature-dependent electrical characteristics. Negligible charge trapping and hysteresis indicated the high quality of the interface between the Al2O3 dielectric and the β–Ga2O3 layer. Only a few changes of the capacitance–voltage curves measured at different temperatures have been shown, suggesting an excellent thermal stability. A high current density of 1228 A cm−2 and ION/IOFF ratio of 1010 indicated the excellent rectifying characteristics. An ideality factor of 1.23 and barrier height of 1.58 eV confirmed the surface repair and reconstruction from the SRE process. These results indicate that SRE can be beneficial for the β–Ga2O3 etching and the future development of β–Ga2O3 power electronics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We designed an original and effective method to study the laser damage mechanism of a β-Ga2O3 single crystal grown by the edge-defined film-fed growth (EFG) method. Structure destruction under irradiation with a high light field intensity of 1064 nm using an Nd:YAG laser was systematically studied in the β-Ga2O3 crystal. Four typical crystal defects, namely, voids, amorphous and nanocrystalline layers and high density stacking faults, were found using a focused ion beam–dual beam scanning electron microscope (FIB-SEM) and a transmission electron microscope (TEM). For the first time, a laser damage mechanism in the β-Ga2O3 subsurface layer was built up and illuminated by microstructure analysis. The stacking fault relaxation of the β-Ga2O3 single crystal was observed in situ for the first time under electron beam irradiation. The cathodoluminescence (CL) spectrum further revealed the luminescence properties of the stacking faults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Herein, bandgap tuning of monoclinic (−201)‐oriented β‐(AlxGa1−x)2O3 thin films is achieved through a β‐Ga2O3/Al2O3 heterojunction by a feasible annealing process with an O2 atmosphere. During the annealing process, Al atoms of the Al2O3 substrate outdiffuse easily into the β‐Ga2O3 thin film deposited by ozone‐assisted molecular beam epitaxy (OMBE). The Al compositions in the β‐(AlxGa1−x)2O3 samples are tuned through adjusting the annealing temperature from 800 to 1300 °C and experimentally determined from the result of X‐ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) measurements combined with Vegard's law. Successive Al‐composition‐gradient β‐(AlxGa1−x)2O3 thin films with controlled bandgap are constructed. On these bases, β‐Ga2O3 thin films are deposited on β‐(AlxGa1−x)2O3 (0 ≤ x ≤ 0.65) substrates through OMBE, yielding β‐Ga2O3/β‐(AlxGa1−x)2O3 (0 ≤ x ≤ 0.65) heterojunction structures, and the band offsets of this heterojunction are determined by XPS accordingly. This methodology to achieve high‐quality β‐(AlxGa1−x)2O3 thin films with adjustable Al composition and tunable band offsets of the β‐Ga2O3/β‐(AlxGa1−x)2O3 interface will provide guidance for potential strategies to develop and fabricate β‐(AlxGa1−x)2O3‐based deep‐UV photodetectors and power devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A low‐resistance Ohmic contact of Pd/Pt/Au metallization scheme is formed on a p‐type GaN film grown by metal‐organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD). Two samples are prepared to explore the effect of contaminations at the metal and GaN interface on the properties of the Ohmic contact. One directly transfers the fresh GaN film from MOCVD to the metal deposition chamber through an ultrahigh vacuum (UHV) tube, without exposing the GaN surface to air; the other transfers the GaN film from MOCVD to metal deposition through the atmosphere. The results show a lower specific contact resistance (6.2 ± 0.9) × 10−5 Ω cm2 for the directly UHV‐transferred sample than the air‐transferred sample (2.1 ± 0.9) × 10−4 Ω cm2. Once exposed to air, carbonaceous particles and an amorphous oxide layer easily adhere to the p‐type GaN surface, which not only increase the Schottky barrier height but also generate more grain boundaries in the Pd/Pt/Au stacks. The grain boundaries, acting as diffusion channels, make Au atoms diffuse easily into the Pd layer and propagate to the p‐GaN surface layer after annealing. Therefore, the Ohmic contact fabricated in UHV ambience with lower oxygen and carbon contaminations at the interface shows superior characteristics than the samples prepared by the traditional method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Growth mechanism and temperature of monoclinic gallium oxide (β‐Ga2O3) films grown by ozone molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) are investigated herein. Phase‐pure (2¯01) β‐Ga2O3 films can be grown on c‐plane sapphire substrates when the growth temperature exceeds 500 °C, and the grain size increases with the increase in the growth temperature. Sixfold rotational domains are obtained based on the epitaxial relationships (Ga2O3 < 010>//Al2O3<11¯00> and Ga2O3 < 102>//Al2O3 < 112¯0>). For the film grown at 700 °C, the threefold facets are observed for the first time, which are resulted from the easy‐cleaved (100) plane and rotational domains. In addition, the cathodoluminescence spectra of the β‐Ga2O3 films show that the proportion of ultraviolet emission increases with the increase in the growth temperature, which is attributed to the modulation of defect. Finally, the growth rate can be modulated by the ratio of Ga flux and ozone pressure. A reference is provided for heteroepitaxy of β‐Ga2O3 films and better understanding of the ozone MBE growth mechanism of oxides. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the issue of the fewer number of feature points and partial important information loss under low illumination of the scale-invariant feature transform ( SIFT) algorithm, a method of image pre-process was proposed, which is to enhance the contrast and improve the brightness for the more obvious feature information and the more abundant feature points before extracting the feature points by SIFT algorithm. Secondly, aiming at the time-consuming and poor real-time problems of the SIFT algorithm caused by the excessive feature descriptor dimension, a new feature point description method was proposed, which reduces the descriptor dimension and improves the running speed of the algorithm. Finally, for the problem of mismatching easily caused by setting uniform threshold for all dimensions of the descriptors in the SIFT algorithm registration process, a weight threshold method was proposed to improve the registration rate by setting different thresholds for the seed points at different positions of the feature points. Experimental results show that, compared with the SIFT algorithm and the PCA-SIFT algorithm, the algorithm registration accuracy is improved by 10% ~20%, and the matching time is also improved. The algorithm can effectively improve the registration accuracy and shorten the running time of the algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]