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Title: Templated Growth of Metastable Polymorphs on Amorphous Substrates with Seed Layers

Journal Article · · Physical Review Applied
 [1];  [2];  [3];  [4];  [3];  [2]; ORCiD logo [3];  [5];  [6];  [7]; ORCiD logo [3]
  1. National Renewable Energy Lab. (NREL), Golden, CO (United States); Fudan Univ., Shanghai (China); ZhengZhou Univ. (China)
  2. Univ. of Colorado, Boulder, CO (United States)
  3. National Renewable Energy Lab. (NREL), Golden, CO (United States)
  4. National Renewable Energy Lab. (NREL), Golden, CO (United States); Oregon State Univ., Corvallis, OR (United States)
  5. Oregon State Univ., Corvallis, OR (United States)
  6. Fudan Univ., Shanghai (China)
  7. National Renewable Energy Lab. (NREL), Golden, CO (United States); Univ. of Colorado, Boulder, CO (United States)
+ Show Author Affiliations

Metastable inorganic materials with unique properties are vital in many practical applications, but their synthesis is often challenging. In physics, epitaxial stabilization, also known as pseudomorphic growth, is used to synthesize metastable polymorphs, but usually only as very thin films and on expensive single-crystal substrates. In chemistry, the templated growth of inorganic solid-state materials on self-assembled monolayers of organic molecules is reported. Bridging these two fields, here, we show that the synthesis of metastable polymorphs is possible up to large film thickness on amorphous substrates covered with thin inorganic seed layers that serve as templates. The stabilization of a 500-nm-thick metastable wurtzite (WZ) MnTe film by a 5-nm-thick ZnTe seed layer sputtered on amorphous glass substrates is experimentally demonstrated. Theoretical calculations explain this experimental observation by the small WZ polymorph energy relative to that of the ground-state nickeline (NC) structure of MnTe and a large lattice constant difference of the two. The resulting metastable WZ-MnTe polymorph exhibits a wide band gap of 2.7 eV and a low hole density of 1012cm-3, which is relevant to optoelectronic applications. These properties are in sharp contrast to those of the narrow-band-gap highly doped NC-MnTe with 1.3 eV band gap and 1019cm-3 hole density. The difference in hole density is due to the calculated difference in the formation energy of manganese vacancy acceptor defects. Overall, these results suggest that templated growth on amorphous substrates with seed layers can be used to synthesize metastable polymorphs of other materials, without the need for expensive single-crystal substrates.

Research Organization:
Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRC) (United States). Center for Next Generation of Materials by Design: Incorporating Metastability (CNGMD); National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Golden, CO (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC), Basic Energy Sciences (BES) (SC-22)
Grant/Contract Number:
AC36-08GO28308
OSTI ID:
1598128
Report Number(s):
NREL/JA--5K00-75602
Journal Information:
Physical Review Applied, Journal Name: Physical Review Applied Journal Issue: 1 Vol. 13; ISSN 2331-7019; ISSN PRAHB2
Publisher:
American Physical Society (APS)Copyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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Related Subjects

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE
71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS
GENERAL PHYSICS
Hall effect measurement
epitaxial growth
first principles defect calculations
metastable polymorph
pseudomorphic stabilization
thin film sputtering
wide-bandgap p-type semiconductors