Indium gallium nitride

[1] Indium gallium nitride is the light-emitting layer in modern blue and green LEDs and often grown on a GaN buffer on a transparent substrate as, e.g. sapphire or silicon carbide.

It has a high heat capacity and its sensitivity to ionizing radiation is low (like other group III nitrides), making it also a potentially suitable material for solar photovoltaic devices, specifically for arrays for satellites.

It is theoretically predicted that spinodal decomposition of indium nitride should occur for compositions between 15% and 85%, leading to In-rich and Ga-rich InGaN regions or clusters.

Light emission from InGaN layers grown on such GaN buffers used in blue and green LEDs is expected to be attenuated because of non-radiative recombination at such defects.

However, atomistic simulations results have shown that emission energies have a minor dependence on small variations of device dimensions.

[19] Nanorod growth may also be advantageous in the reduction of treading dislocations which may act as charge traps reducing solar cell efficiency [20] Metal-modulated epitaxy allows controlled atomic layer-by-layer growth of thin films with almost ideal characteristics enabled by strain relaxation at the first atomic layer.

Films were grown at ~400 °C to facilitate indium incorporation and with precursor modulation to enhance surface morphology and metal adlayer diffusion.