12/15/2023
We are calling on our physics and engineering majors to come meet our prospective new faculty!
This Friday, Sara Chamberlin will be visiting our campus. Students will have a chance to hear her speak about her research in the morning, and will have a chance to speak with her in the Physics Seminar Room before lunch. (Note the time is 11:15 AM not Pm!)
Please try to fit one of these sessions into your schedules! Student feedback on candidates is a very important part of our decision making process.
Talk Abstract: Performance Enhancing Metal Oxides
Metal oxides are used in the design of many products and devices we use daily, with applications as wide ranging as pigments, photovoltaics, touchscreens, and LED’s. These materials have recently generated interest in the fields of electronics and renewable energy due to their abundance and generally non-toxic nature, making them a good environmental choice for future technologies. For example, gallium oxide (Ga2O3) is a promising material for more efficient high power electronic devices, transparent conducting oxide layers, and ultraviolet detectors; its theoretical performance exceeds even silicon carbide and gallium nitride, some of the most popular semiconductor materials today.
While metal oxides show great potential for electronic devices, the properties of these materials, such as the bandgap or conductivity, must be tailored to specific applications. One way to achieve this is through doping, which replaces a fraction of the atoms in the material with a different element. In this talk I will describe how we create magnesium (Mg)-doped Ga2O3 thin-films using the technique of spray pyrolysis. Characterization of our films with UV-Vis spectroscopy indicates that the optical bandgap can be increased with magnesium concentration. At the same time, X-ray diffraction, used to verify the crystalline structure, reveals there is some phase segregation present in the material. Along with the current results of our Mg-doped Ga2O3 thin-films, I’ll discuss future plans for the fabrication and characterization of this and other technologically important, doped metal oxide films.
