Yttrium nitride

Yttrium nitride, YN, is a nitride of yttrium.
Yttrium nitride is hard ceramic material similar to titanium nitride and zirconium nitride. Under ambient conditions, rock salt phase of YN stablizes and its lattice constant is 4.88 Å.
Yttrium nitride shows similar semiconducting properties as the nitrides of lanthanum, scandium. In its rock salt structure, YN exhibits an indirect bandgap in the range of 0.9-1.3 eV.
Additionally the lattice structure of YN differs only by 8% from that of gallium nitride. This makes YN a possible buffer layer between a substrate and the GaN layer during GaN crystal growth.