The interest in plasmonic technologies surrounds many emergent optoelectronic applications, such as plasmon lasers, transistors, sensors and information storage. Although plasmonic materials for ultraviolet-visible and near-infrared wavelengths have been found, the mid-infrared range remains a challenge to address: few known systems can achieve subwavelength optical confinement with low loss in this range. With a combination of experiments and ab initio modelling, here we demonstrate an extreme peak of electron mobility in Dy-doped CdO that is achieved through accurate 'defect equilibrium engineering'. In so doing, we create a tunable plasmon host that satisfies the criteria for mid-infrared spectrum plasmonics, and overcomes the losses seen in conventional plasmonic materials. In particular, extrinsic doping pins the CdO Fermi level above the conduction band minimum and it increases the formation energy of native oxygen vacancies, thus reducing their populations by several orders of magnitude. The substitutional lattice strain induced by Dy doping is sufficiently small, allowing mobility values around 500 cm(2) V(-1) s(-1) for carrier densities above 10(20) cm(-3). Our work shows that CdO:Dy is a model system for intrinsic and extrinsic manipulation of defects affecting electrical, optical and thermal properties, that oxide conductors are ideal candidates for plasmonic devices and that the defect engineering approach for property optimization is generally applicable to other conducting metal oxides.

Metal-polar, Al-rich AlGaN films were grown on both single crystalline AlN and sapphire substrates. The role of surface morphology and surface kinetics on AlGaN composition is presented. With the reduced dislocation density of the films grown on AlN substrates, atomically smooth bilayer stepped surfaces are achieved with RMS roughness of less than 50 pm for a 5x5 µm 2 AFM scan area. By controlling the surface supersaturation through adjusting the growth rate, a transition from 2D nucleation to step flow was observed. The critical misorientation angle for step-bunching in nominal Al 0.70 Ga 0.30 N grown with a growth rate of 600 nm/hr on AlN substrates was found to be 0.4°. The composition of bilayer stepped AlGaN was strongly dependent on substrate misorientation angle, where a compositional variation by a factor of two for a change in misorientation angle from 0.05 to 0.40° was observed; this is explained by the different surface diffusion lengths of Ga and Al. Step-bunching resulted in strong compositional inhomogeneity as observed by photoluminescence and scanning transmission electron microscopy studies.

We present experimental measurements of the thermal boundary conductance (TBC) from 78–500 K across isolated heteroepitaxially grown ZnO films on GaN substrates. This data provides an assessment of the underlying assumptions driving phonon gas-based models, such as the diffuse mismatch model (DMM), and atomistic Green’s function (AGF) formalisms used to predict TBC. Our measurements, when compared to previous experimental data, suggest that TBC can be influenced by long wavelength, zone center modes in a material on one side of the interface as opposed to the ‘“vibrational mismatch”’ concept assumed in the DMM; this disagreement is pronounced at high temperatures. At room temperature, we measure the ZnO/GaN TBC as 490­[+150,–110] MW m–2 K–1. The disagreement among the DMM and AGF, and the experimental data at elevated temperatures, suggests a non-negligible contribution from other types of modes that are not accounted for in the fundamental assumptions of these harmonic based formalisms, which may rely on anharmonicity. Given the high quality of these ZnO/GaN interfaces, these results provide an invaluable, critical, and quantitative assessment of the accuracy of assumptions in the current state of the art computational approaches used to predict phonon TBC across interfaces.

In this report we demonstrate fluorine-doped CdO as a model infrared plasmonic material by virtue of its tunable carrier density, high mobility, and intense extreme-subwavelength plasmon−polariton coupling. Carrier concentrations ranging from 10 19 to 10 20 cm −3 , with electron mobility values as high as 473 cm 2 /V•s, are readily achieved in epitaxial CdO films over a thickness range spanning 50 to 500 nm. Carrier concentration is achieved by reactive sputtering in an Ar/O 2 atmosphere with trace quantities of CF 4 . Infrared reflectometry measurements demonstrate the possibility of near-perfect plasmonic absorption through the entire mid-IR spectral range. A companion set of reflectivity simulations are used to predict, understand, and optimize the epsilon-near-zero plasmonic modes. In the context of other transparent conductors, CdO exhibits substantially higher electron mobility values and thus sharp and tunable absorption features. This highlights the utility of high-mobility transparent conducting oxides as a materials system for supporting strong, designed light−matter interactions.

A long‐standing challenge to the widespread application of complex oxide thin films is the stable and robust integration of noble metal electrodes, such as platinum, which remains the optimal choice for numerous applications. By considering both work of adhesion and stability against chemical diffusion, it is demonstrated that the use of an improved adhesion layer (namely, ZnO) between the silicon substrate and platinum bottom electrode enables dramatic improvements in the properties of the overlying functional oxide films. Using BaTiO3 and Pb(Zr,Ti)O3 films as test cases, it is shown that the use of ZnO as the adhesion layer leads directly to increased process temperature capabilities and dramatic improvements in chemical homogeneity of the films. These result in significant property enhancements (e.g., 300% improvement to bulk‐like permittivity for the BaTiO3 films) of oxide films prepared on Pt/ZnO as compared to the conventional Pt/Ti and Pt/TiOx stacks. A comparison of electrical, structural, and chemical properties that demonstrate the impact of adhesion layer chemistry on the chemical homogeneity of the overlying complex oxide is presented. Collectively, this analysis shows that in addition to the simple need for adhesion, metal‐oxide layers between noble metals and silicon can have tremendous chemical impact on the terminal complex oxide layers.