Preface: Phys. Status Solidi C 5/2011

Abstract

AbstractIII–V semiconductors are indispensable for today's optoelectronic devices such as la‐sers used in optical communication systems. Likewise, this class of material is dominant in key high frequency electronics components for wireless com‐munication systems. The miscibility of binary III–Vs and the possibility of stacking such layers of various compositions and doping levels are crucial for all these applications. The tailoring of het‐erostructure properties is limited by the different lat‐tice constants of the binary III–Vs, which limit the range of useful compositions and thereby the range of available band gaps. The alignment of the band edges, which is very important for the perfor‐mance of devices, cannot be tailored by the combina‐tion of conventional materials at all. These limitations encountered in InP and GaAs based devices can be greatly reduced by incorporating a few percent of N or Bi as a group V element into GaAs or InGaAs, i.e. by creating the so‐called “Dilute Nitrides”.The second class of III–V–nitrides is based on the In1–xGaxN compound. It was discovered in 2001 that InN has a much smaller fundamental energy gap than was believed hitherto [1]. As a consequence the range of wavelengths that can be accessed by alloying this material with gallium nitride (GaN) has been significantly extended. Indeed GaInN has the widest range of direct gap of any compound semiconductors ranging from 0.7 eV to 3.2 eV which can be utilized in optoelectronic device applications over a wide range of wavelengths, including numerous key wavelengths for applications in the medical, environmental and communications fields.This issue of physica status solidi contains a collection of the articles presented during the 2010 E‐MRS Spring Meeting 2010, Symposium G, entitled “Physics and Applications of Novel Gain Ma‐terials based on III–V–N Com‐pounds”. The symposium was a follow up to a similar session held at E‐MRS in 2007. In 2007 there were fifty participants while the session in 2010 which was organised in collaboration with COST Action MP 0805 attracted over 100 participants. This increase in the number of attendants is indicative of the growing interest in III–V–dilute nitride compound semiconductors for potential applications in future devices. The symposium comprised 30 oral presentations, including 7 invited presentations and 50 poster presentations covering a wide range of dilute‐nitride and In1–xGaxN compound research from growth and structural properties, transport and optical properties to device applications.