Band-gap engineering at a semiconductor - crystalline oxide interface

TLDR: In this article, the authors apply principles of band gap engineering traditionally used at heterojunctions between conventional semiconductors to control the band offset between a single crystalline oxide and a semiconductor.

Abstract: The epitaxial growth of crystalline oxides on semiconductors provides a pathway to introduce new functionalities to semiconductor devices. Key to electrically coupling crystalline oxides with semiconductors to realize functional behavior is controlling the manner in which their bands align at interfaces. Here we apply principles of band gap engineering traditionally used at heterojunctions between conventional semiconductors to control the band offset between a single crystalline oxide and a semiconductor. Reactive molecular beam epitaxy is used to realize atomically abrupt and structurally coherent interfaces between SrZr$_{x}$Ti$_{1-x}$O$_3$ and Ge, in which the band-gap of the former is enhanced with Zr content $x$. We present structural and electrical characterization of SrZr$_{x}$Ti$_{1-x}$O$_3$-Ge heterojunctions for $x$ = 0.2 to 0.75 and demonstrate the band offset can be tuned from type-II to type-I, with the latter being verified using photoemission measurements. The type-I band offset provides a platform to integrate the dielectric, ferroelectric and ferromagnetic functionalities of oxides with semiconducting devices.