Next week, the annual Electronic Materials Conference (EMC) will be held in Santa Barbara, CA, where Lake Shore will be on hand to answer questions about our cryogenic probe stations, Hall effect measurement systems, and our new Model 8501 THz system for materials characterization. Because EMC is the premier gathering of scientists involved in the characterization of electronic materials, we’ll likely be getting a number of questions about how the THz system can be applied to electronic materials research specifically.
As we’ve mentioned earlier, THz radiation can be very useful in the study a wide variety of electronic materials. THz wavelengths not only match the feature sizes of development-grade electronic materials (10 mm × 10 mm), but couple very strongly to the free-carrier motion of a number of electronic materials, including semiconductor thin films. These include highly doped zinc oxide (ZnO) semiconductor materials, which are seen as potential lower-cost alternative materials for transparent electrode applications, such as those designed for solar cell and organic light-emitting diode (OLED) technologies. And, more recently, doped ZnO films are being examined as a possible plasmonic material for near- to mid-infrared (IR) wavelengths—a spectral region inaccessible to conventional, noble-metal-based plasmonic structures.
If you’re going to the UC-Santa Barbara conference and the subject of THz for ZnO thin-film characterization interests you, be sure to see Dr. David Daughton’s talk on “Variable-Temperature Terahertz Conductivity of Gallium-Doped ZnO Thin Films,” which will take place 11 a.m. Friday, June 27, during the KK: THz and IR Metamaterials and Surfaces session of the conference. He will share insights on ongoing research related to the study of dynamic conductivity of thin-film ZnO materials when combining temperature-dependent Hall effect measurements with variable-temperature continuous wave (CW) THz spectroscopy.