Scandium nitride
Scandium nitride is a binary III-V indirect bandgap semiconductor. It is composed of the scandium cation and the nitride anion. It forms crystals that can be grown on tungsten foil through sublimation and recondensation. It has a rock-salt crystal structure with octahedral bonding coordination. It exhibits lattice constant of 0.451 nm and an indirect bandgap of 0.9 eV and direct bandgap of 2 to 2.4 eV. These crystals can be synthesized by dissolving nitrogen gas with indium-scandium melts, magnetron sputtering, Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE), HVPE and other deposition methods. Scandium nitride is also an effective gate for semiconductors on a silicon dioxide or hafnium dioxide substrate. Scandium nitride is the first nitride semiconductor reported to be synthesized without an active Nitrogen plasma source using the Molecular Beam Epitaxy technique. It exhibits a scavenging effect, in which scandium at the growth front dissociates molecular nitrogen and incorporates it into the lattice. Scandium nitride can be potentially used in thermoelectric materials as a semiconducting layer in epitaxial single-crystalline metal/semiconductor superlattices for thermoelectric, plasmonic and thermophotonic applications, and as a substrate material for high-quality GaN-based devices and other solid-state applications.