Hexagonal boron nitride is an indirect bandgap semiconductor

By G. Cassabois, P. Valvin, B. Gil. Nature Photonics, 2015

1,209 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Hexagonal boron nitride is a wide bandgap semiconductor with very high thermal and chemical stability that is used in devices operating under extreme conditions. The growth of high-purity crystals has recently revealed the potential of this material for deep ultraviolet emission, with intense emission around 215 nm. In the last few years, hexagonal boron nitride has been attracting even more attention with the emergence of two-dimensional atomic crystals and van der Waals heterostructures, initiated with the discovery of graphene. Despite this growing interest and a seemingly simple structure, the basic questions of the bandgap nature and value are still controversial. Here, we resolve this long-debated issue by demonstrating evidence for an indirect bandgap at 5.955 eV by means of optical spectroscopy. We demonstrate the existence of phonon-assisted optical transitions and we measure an exciton binding energy of about 130 meV by two-photon spectroscopy. Scientists resolve the long-debated issue of the nature and value of the bandgap in hexagonal boron nitride by providing evidence for an indirect bandgap at 5.955 eV and an exciton binding energy of about 130 meV by means of optical spectroscopy.

Subfields: Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f25af20ac198a5e8368cd8ff08fc8c9fd4c088dc

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In Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

In Materials Chemistry

Citations in the corpus

Compact Cavity-Enhanced Single-Photon Generation with Hexagonal Boron Nitride (2019, background): “The large band gap of 6 eV[17] also prevents non-radiative decay, which in turn allows for high quantum efficiencies.”
Production and processing of graphene and related materials (2020, background): “The excitonic nature of these recombinations is supported by theoretical studies [1335, 1336] but their fine structure splitting and their correlation with absorption data are still intensively debated [1334, 1337-1340].”