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

Tristan K. Truttmann*, Jin Jian Zhou, I. Te Lu, Anil Kumar Rajapitamahuni, Fengdeng Liu, Thomas E. Mates, Marco Bernardi*, Bharat Jalan*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

15 Citations (Scopus)

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 NdxSr1xSnO3 (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.

Original languageEnglish
Article number241
JournalCommunications Physics
Volume4
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Dec 2021
Externally publishedYes

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