Pressure-Tuneable Visible-Range Band Gap in the Ionic Spinel Tin Nitride

John S.C. Kearney, Miglė Graužinytė, Dean Smith, Daniel Sneed, Christian Childs, Jasmine Hinton, Changyong Park, Jesse S. Smith, Eunja Kim, Samuel D.S. Fitch, Andrew L. Hector, Chris J. Pickard, José A. Flores-Livas, Ashkan Salamat

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

25 Scopus citations

Abstract

The application of pressure allows systematic tuning of the charge density of a material cleanly, that is, without changes to the chemical composition via dopants, and exploratory high-pressure experiments can inform the design of bulk syntheses of materials that benefit from their properties under compression. The electronic and structural response of semiconducting tin nitride Sn3N4 under compression is now reported. A continuous opening of the optical band gap was observed from 1.3 eV to 3.0 eV over a range of 100 GPa, a 540 nm blue-shift spanning the entire visible spectrum. The pressure-mediated band gap opening is general to this material across numerous high-density polymorphs, implicating the predominant ionic bonding in the material as the cause. The rate of decompression to ambient conditions permits access to recoverable metastable states with varying band gaps energies, opening the possibility of pressure-tuneable electronic properties for future applications.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)11623-11628
Number of pages6
JournalAngewandte Chemie - International Edition
Volume57
Issue number36
DOIs
StatePublished - Sep 3 2018
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • ab initio calculations
  • high-pressure chemistry
  • nitrides
  • semiconductors

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