Skip to main content

Nano thin film Barium Stannate :New revolution to electronics and solar industry

A team of researchers, led by the University of Minnesota, have discovered a new nano-scale thin film material with the highest-ever conductivity in its class. The new material could lead to smaller, faster, and more powerful electronics, as well as more efficient solar cells.
The discovery is being published today in Nature Communications, an open access journal that publishes high-quality research from all areas of the natural sciences.
Researchers say that what makes this new material so unique is that it has a high conductivity, which helps electronics conduct more electricity and become more powerful. But the material also has a wide bandgap, which means light can easily pass through the material making it optically transparent. In most cases, materials with wide bandgap, usually have either low conductivity or poor transparency.
"The high conductivity and wide bandgap make this an ideal material for making optically transparent conducting films which could be used in a wide variety of electronic devices, including high power electronics, electronic displays, touchscreens and even solar cells in which light needs to pass through the device," said Bharat Jalan, a University of Minnesota chemical engineering and materials science professor and the lead researcher on the study.
Currently, most of the transparent conductors in our electronics use a chemical element called indium. The price of indium has gone up tremendously in the past few years significantly adding to the cost of current display technology. As a result, there has been tremendous effort to find alternative materials that work as well, or even better, than indium-based transparent conductors.
In this study, researchers found a solution. They developed a new transparent conducting thin film using a novel synthesis method, in which they grew a BaSnO3 thin film (a combination of barium, tin and oxygen, called barium stannate), but replaced elemental tin source with a chemical precursor of tin. The chemical precursor of tin has unique, radical properties that enhanced the chemical reactivity and greatly improved the metal oxide formation process. Both barium and tin are significantly cheaper than indium and are abundantly available.
"We were quite surprised at how well this unconventional approach worked the very first time we used the tin chemical precursor," said University of Minnesota chemical engineering and materials science graduate student Abhinav Prakash, the first author of the paper. "It was a big risk, but it was quite a big breakthrough for us."
Jalan and Prakash said this new process allowed them to create this material with unprecedented control over thickness, composition, and defect concentration and that this process should be highly suitable for a number of other material systems where the element is hard to oxidize. The new process is also reproducible and scalable.
They further added that it was the structurally superior quality with improved defect concentration that allowed them to discover high conductivity in the material. They said the next step is to continue to reduce the defects at the atomic scale.
"Even though this material has the highest conductivity within the same materials class, there is much room for improvement in addition, to the outstanding potential for discovering new physics if we decrease the defects. That's our next goal," Jalan said.
Source

  1. Abhinav Prakash, Peng Xu, Alireza Faghaninia, Sudhanshu Shukla, Joel W. Ager, Cynthia S. Lo, Bharat Jalan. Wide bandgap BaSnO3 films with room temperature conductivity exceeding 104 S cm−1. Nature Communications, 2017; 8: 15167 DOI:10.1038/ncomms15167
  1. University of Minnesota. "Discovery of new transparent thin film material could improve electronics and solar cells: Conductivity is highest-ever for thin film oxide semiconductor material." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 5 May 2017. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170505151620.htm>

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nanoimprinting accelerating the fabrication of nano-optical devices

Combining speed with incredible precision, a team of researchers has developed a way to print a nanoscale imaging probe onto the tip of a glass fiber as thin as a human hair, accelerating the production of the promising new device from several per month to several per day. The high-throughput fabrication technique opens the door for the widespread adoption of this and other nano-optical structures, which squeeze and manipulate light in ways that are unachievable by conventional optics. Nano-optics have the potential to be used for imaging, sensing, and spectroscopy, and could help scientists improve solar cells, design better drugs, and make faster semiconductors. A big obstacle to the technology's commercial use, however, is its time-consuming production process. The new fabrication method, called fiber nanoimprinting, could unplug this bottleneck. It was developed by scientists at the Molecular Foundry, located at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley Nat
Post a Comment
Read more

Quantum switch:a new revolution in the technology

When a ballerina pirouettes, twirling a full revolution, she looks just as she did when she started. But for electrons and other subatomic particles, which follow the rules of quantum theory, that's not necessarily so. When an electron moves around a closed path, ending up where it began, its physical state may or may not be the same as when it left. Now, there is a way to control the outcome, thanks to an international research group led by scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The team has developed the first switch that turns on and off this mysterious quantum behavior. The discovery promises to provide new insight into the fundamentals of quantum theory and may lead to new quantum electronic devices. To study this quantum property, NIST physicist and fellow Joseph A. Stroscio and his colleagues studied electrons corralled in special orbits within a nanometer-sized region of graphene -- an ultrastrong, single layer of tightly packed carb
Post a Comment
Read more

Linking hydrogen atom to silicon surface: A new way for greener, smaller and faster electronics

A key step in unlocking the potential for greener, faster, smaller electronic circuitry was taken recently by a group of researchers led by UAlberta physicist Robert Wolkow. The research team found a way to delete and replace out-of-place atoms that had been preventing new revolutionary circuitry designs from working. This unleashes a new kind of silicon chips for used in common electronic products, such as our phones and computers. "For the first time, we can unleash the powerful properties inherent to the atomic scale," explained Wolkow, noting that printing errors on silicon chips are inevitable when working at the atomic scale. "We were making things that were close to perfect but not quite there. Now that we have the ability to make corrections, we can ensure perfect patterns, and that makes the circuits work. It is this new ability to edit at the atom scale that makes all the difference." Think of a typing mistake and the ability to go back and white
Post a Comment
Read more