Basic Physical Properties of Cubic Boron Arsenide

Abstract

Cubic boron arsenide (BAs) is an emerging semiconductor material with a record-high thermal conductivity of 1300 W/mK. However, many fundamental properties of BAs remain unexplored experimentally. Here, for the first time, we report the systematic experimental measurements of important physical properties of BAs, including the bandgap, optical refractive index, stiffness, elastic modulus, shear modulus, Poisson ratio, thermal expansion coefficient, and heat capacity. In particular, light absorption and Fabry Perot interference were used to measure an optical bandgap of 1.82 eV and a refractive index of 3.29 (657 nm) at room temperature. A pico-ultrasonic method, based on ultrafast optical pump probe spectroscopy, was used to measure a high elastic modulus of 326 GPa, which is twice that of silicon. Furthermore, temperature dependent X-ray diffraction was used to measure a linear thermal expansion coefficient of 3.85x10^-6 per K; this value is very close to prototype semiconductors such as GaN, which underscores the promise of BAs for cooling high power and high frequency electronics. We also performed ab initio theory calculations and observed good agreement between the experimental and theoretical results. Importantly, this work aims to build a database (Table I) for the basic physical properties of BAs with the expectation that this semiconductor will inspire broad research and applications in electronics, photonics, and mechanics.

This paper reports the experimental database of the important physical properties of BAs, including the bandgap, optical refractive index, elastic modulus, shear modulus, Poisson ratio, thermal expansion coefficient, heat capacity, and Gruneisen parameter etc., with the expectation that this new semiconductor will inspire broad research and applications in electronics, photonics, and mechanics

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Cited by in corpus (15)

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• Temperature dependent elastic constants and thermodynamic properties of BAs: an ab-initio investigation
• Ab initio determination of ultrahigh thermal conductivity in ternary compounds
• The direct and indirect optical absorptions of cubic BAs and BSb
• Effect of nucleation sites on the growth and quality of single-crystal boron arsenide
• Zero-point lattice expansion and band gap renormalization: Grüneisen approach versus free energy minimization
• Invariant expansion of the 30-band k.p model and its parameters for III-V compounds
• Quasiparticle and fully self-consistent GW methods: an unbiased analysis using Gaussian orbitals
• Strong Temperature Dependence of Thermal Conductivity in High-Purity Cubic Boron Arsenide
• QUANTUM ESPRESSO implementation of the RPA-based functional
• Local Exchange-Correlation Potentials by Density Inversion in Solids
• One-particle and excitonic band structure in cubic Boron Arsenide
• Exceptional Optical Phonon Coherence in Enriched Cubic Boron Arsenide via Suppression of Three-Phonon Scattering
• Nonperturbative isotope effect on light-matter interaction in boron arsenide