GaN nanostructures

 

✅ It is a widely used material for blue light emission like Blue LEDs

🔸It is one of the most advanced semiconductors.

🔸 It is already used in visible and ultraviolet light with LEDs and laser diodes

✳️ Now, for the first time a new method to confine and absorb infrared (IR) light with GaN nanostructures has been developed.

↪️ A scientific phenomenon called surface polariton excitations in GaN nanostructures leads to light-matter interactions at IR spectral range.

❓ Surface polaritons are special modes of electromagnetic waves traveling at the interface of a conductor and an insulator such as air.

↪️ By altering the morphology and shape of the nanostructures, they are also able to excite plasmon polaritons in GaN, which results in extending the light-matter coupling to further reaches of the electromagnetic spectrum.

↪️ Surface polaritons are quasi-particles which have both light and matter characteristics.

🔸 To grow these GaN nanostructures, the researchers utilized a specialized material deposition instrument called molecular beam epitaxy.

↪️ This instrument uses ultra-high vacuum, like the conditions of outer space.

↪️ This instrument grows high-quality material nanostructures with dimensions about 100000 times smaller than the width of a human hair.

✳️ Applications:

✅ It can help develop highly efficient infrared absorbers, emitters, and modulators that are useful in defense technologies, energy technologies, imaging, sensing, and so on.

✅ Polaritonic technologies have attracted a wide range of applications, such as secure high-speed light-based communication (LiFi), next-generation light sources, solar energy converters, quantum computers, and waste-heat converters.

✅ The infrared surface polariton excitations can be translated to many other semiconductors as well.