Abstract
Boron nitride (BN) is a fascinating ultra-wide bandgap semiconductor offering extreme material properties that can be leveraged in a range of potential applications including (opto-)electronic and quantum devices. Availability of high-quality, large-area and volume, single-crystal material would provide a significant boon to the community facilitating or enabling development of devices. BN has been successfully grown using high pressure, high temperature presses and precipitation from a solvent on the order of a few millimeters. While these methods have yielded high-quality material, scaling of these approaches is challenging motivating the search for additional bulk synthesis methods. This talk will present foundational work being performed in the pursuit of bulk BN growth using two industrial scalable methods: the ammonothermal method and a flux-based approach.The ammonothermal method utilizes supercritical ammonia at temperatures and pressures around 400—600 °C and 100—250 MPa, respectively. One or more mineralizers are added to the solution to enhance the solubility of BN. This talk will demonstrate temperature-dependent solubility of BN in basic ammonothermal solutions containing alkali [1] and/or alkaline earth metals. Initial crystal growth experiments were performed using sodium as the mineralizer yielding the spontaneous nucleation and growth of sub-mm sized hexagonal and rhombohedral BN.The flux-based method uses a solvent exhibiting exceptionally high solubility of nitrogen and boron. A dedicated growth system has been developed and initial growth runs have demonstrated the solubility and growth of BN from solution. Preliminary growth campaigns have successfully demonstrated the growth of ~ >0.1 mm sized BN crystals after 1-2 days.This work has been supported by NSF DMR 1832824, NSF CAREER 2046468, ARL DEVCOM UWBG RF Electronics Center, and Lehigh Startup Funds.[1] Dooley, J., Stoddard, N., Landskron, K. & Pimputkar, S. On the solubility of boron nitride in supercritical ammonia-sodium solutions. J. Cryst. Growth 621, 127381 (2023). doi: 10.1016/j.jcrysgro.2023.127381
Published Version
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