Ferroelectric wurtzites show great promise for enabling advanced communications technologies and for reducing computational energy consumption, both of which are key goals of the nation and the National Science Foundation. Their commercial deployment is hindered by limited understanding of the impacts of defect populations on properties, but current state-of-the-art computational techniques rely on unrealistic dilute-limit assumptions that ignore defect interactions with one another and/or with interfaces.

This research aims to rigorously capture the interactions and effects of point defects such as heterovalent substitutions (e.g., oxygen replacing nitrogen) and extended defects (e.g., structural damage from bombardment during sputter growth) on properties in wurtzite nitrides. The team includes world experts in simulation, synthesis, characterization, and testing from the U.S. and Germany, and it includes partners from the Army Research Laboratory (ARL) and an industrial advisory board (IAB) who will build on relevant findings to accelerate scale-up and deployment as appropriate. The goal is to bridge the gap between calculations requiring simplifying assumptions and real films grown using commercial techniques to accelerate deployment of these and future DMREF-developed materials.