Band-Gap Engineering at a Semiconductor-Crystalline Oxide Interface

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 to control the manner in which their bands align at interfaces. Here, principles of band-gap engineering traditionally used at heterojunctions between conventional semiconductors are applied 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 SrZrxTi1-xO3 and Ge, in which the band-gap of the former is enhanced with Zr content x. Structural and electrical characterization of SrZrxTi1-xO3-Ge heterojunctions for x = 0.2 to 0.75 are presented and it is demonstrated that 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.