U.S.-Austria Cooperative Research on Narrow Bandgap IV-VI Semiconductor Microstructures

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This award will support collaborative research on the topic of semiconductor microstructures. The US investigators are Dr. Arto Nurmikko and Dr.Phillip Stiles, Brown University, and Dr. Bennet Goldberg, Boston University. The Austrian collaborator is Professor Gunther Bauer, Institut fur Physik, University of Linz, Austria. The goal of the project is to explore novel semiconductor microstructures, based on Narrow bandgap IV-VI compounds. A range of sophisticated experimental studies are proposed, with emphasis on lower dimensional electronic phenomena in quantizing magnetic fields. Specifically, compositional and doping superlattices, hetero- junctions and other microstructures of column four and column six elements will be grown, fabricated and studied by optical and transport experimental probes. The emphasis on PbTe- based systems is due to the inherent high carrier mobilities, ease of doping, and large dielectric constant unavailable in other materials. The study will concentrate on determining the unusual many body properties of systems when the Coulomb energy between carriers is of the same order of magnitude as the kinetic energy. They will also examine the reduced dimensional aspects of this interaction, by creating compositional and doping heterojunctions which confine the carriers in two dimensions. The experimental tools to be applied are magneto-transport, interband and intraband magneto-optics, and transient optical probes. Samples will be grown in Austria and patterned at Boston University and Brown University. The project will benefit from the complementary expertise of the US and Austrian investigators and their past history of successful collaboration.