In the past several years, research in each of the wide-band-gap semiconductors, SiC, GaN, and ZnSe, has led to major advances which now make them viable for device applications. The merits of each contender for high-temperature electronics and short-wavelength optical applications are compared. The outstanding thermal and chemical stability of SiC and GaN should enable them to operate at high temperatures and in hostile environments, and also make them attractive for high-power operation. The present advanced stage of development of SiC substrates and metal-oxide-semiconductor technology makes SiC the leading contender for high-temperature and high-power applications if ohmic contacts and interface-state densities can be further improved. GaN, despite fundamentally superior electronic properties and better ohmic contact resistances, must overcome the lack of an ideal substrate material and a relatively advanced SiC infrastructure in order to compete in electronics applications. Prototype transistors have been fabricated from both SiC and GaN, and the microwave characteristics and high-temperature performance of SiC transistors have been studied. For optical emitters and detectors, ZnSe, SiC, and GaN all have demonstrated operation in the green, blue, or ultraviolet (UV) spectra. Blue SiC light-emitting diodes (LEDs) have been on the market for several years, joined recently by UV and blue GaN-based LEDs. These products should find wide use in full color display and other technologies. Promising prototype UV photodetectors have been fabricated from both SiC and GaN. In laser development, ZnSe leads the way with more sophisticated designs having further improved performance being rapidly demonstrated. If the low damage threshold of ZnSe continues to limit practical laser applications, GaN appears poised to become the semiconductor of choice for short-wavelength lasers in optical memory and other applications. For further development of these materials to be realized, doping densities (especially p type) and ohmic contact technologies have to be improved. Economies of scale need to be realized through the development of larger SiC substrates. Improved substrate materials, ideally GaN itself, need to be aggressively pursued to further develop the GaN-based material system and enable the fabrication of lasers. ZnSe material quality is already outstanding and now researchers must focus their attention on addressing the short lifetimes of ZnSe-based lasers to determine whether the material is sufficiently durable for practical laser applications. The problems related to these three wide-band-gap semiconductor systems have moved away from materials science toward the device arena, where their technological development can rapidly be brought to maturity.

We report a new metallization process for achieving low resistance ohmic contacts to molecular beam epitaxy grown n-GaN (∼1017 cm−3) using an Al/Ti bilayer metallization scheme. Four different thin-film contact metallizations were compared during the investigation, including Au, Al, Ti/Au, and Ti/Al layers. The metals were first deposited via conventional electron-beam evaporation onto the GaN substrate, and then thermally annealed in a temperature range from 500 to 900 °C in a N2 ambient using rapid thermal annealing techniques. The lowest value for the specific contact resistivity of 8×10−6 Ω cm2, was obtained using Ti/Al metallization with anneals of 900 °C for 30 s. X-ray diffraction and Auger electron spectroscopy depth profile were employed to investigate the metallurgy of contact formation.

In this work we predict several new types of topological semimetals that exhibit a bulk quadrupole moment. These semimetals are modeled with a 3D extension of the 2D quadrupole topological insulator. One type of semimetal has bulk nodes and gapped, topological surfaces. A second type, which we may call a higher order topological semimetal, has a gapped bulk, but harbors a Dirac semimetal with an even number of nodes on one or more surfaces. The final type has a gapped bulk, but harbors half of a Dirac semimetal on multiple surfaces. Each of these semimetals gives rise to mid-gap hinge states and hinge charge, as well as surface polarization, which are all consequences of a bulk quadrupole moment. We show how the bulk quadrupole moments of these systems can be calculated from the momentum-locations of bulk or surface nodes in the energy spectrum. Finally, we illustrate that in some cases it is useful to examine nodes in the Wannier bands, instead of the energy bands, to extract the bulk quadrupole moment.

Conventional topological superconductors are fully gapped in the bulk but host gapless Majorana modes on their boundaries. We instead focus on a new class of superconductors, second-order topological superconductors, that have gapped, topological surfaces and gapless Majorana modes instead on lower-dimensional boundaries, i.e., corners of a two-dimensional system or hinges for a three-dimensional system. Here we propose two general scenarios in which second-order topological superconductivity can be realized spontaneously with weak-pairing instabilities. First, we show that px + ipy-wave pairing in a (doped) Dirac semimetal in two dimensions with four mirror symmetric Dirac nodes realizes second-order topological superconductivity. Second, we show that p+id pairing on an ordinary spin-degenerate Fermi sruface realizes second-order topological superconductivity as well. In the latter case we find that the topological invariants describing the system can be written using simple formulae involving only the low-energy properties of the Fermi surfaces and superconducting pairing. In both cases we show that these exotic superconducting states can be intrinsically realized in a metallic system with electronic interactions. For the latter case we also show it can be induced by proximity effect in a heterostructure of cuprate and topological superconductors. arXiv:1804.01531v3 [cond-mat.supr-con]

Reactive ion etching with SiCl4 and BCl3 of high quality GaN films grown by plasma enhanced molecular beam epitaxy is reported. Factors such as gas chemistry, flow rate, and microwave power affecting the etching rate are discussed. The etch rate has been found to be larger with BCl3 than with SiCl4 plasma. An etch rate of 8.5 Å/s was obtained with the BCl3 plasma for a plasma power of 200 W, pressure of 10 mTorr, and flow rate of 40 sccm. Auger electron spectroscopy (AES) was used to investigate the surface of GaN films after etching. Oxygen contamination has been detected from the AES profiles of etched GaN samples.