ECE Distinguished Speaker Series: Debdeep Jena, "Taming ultrawide bandgap semiconductors using broken symmetry"

A 6 eV bandgap crystal used to be a textbook example of an electrical insulator. But today it has become possible to make pn diodes, transistors, LEDs, and lasers with ultrawide bandgap nitride semiconductors. In the first part of my talk, I will discuss how over the last 25 years, we have discovered a powerful new tool rooted in the physics of broken symmetry in semiconductor crystals to tame the conductivity of ultrawide bandgap semiconductor heterostructures. I will discuss how this long and systematic study has now unleashed their remarkable potential to advance the field of semiconductor devices beyond what was imaginable in the 20th century, ranging from electronics, photonics to memory. In the second part of my talk, I will discuss how we are using these new advances in semiconductor materials and device physics and high-speed microwave electronics to enable new advances to the emerging field of devices for quantum computation, communication, sensing, and metrology. Debdeep Jena is the David E. Burr Professor of Engineering at Cornell University. His teaching and research are in the quantum physics of semiconductors and electronic and photonic devices based on quantized semiconductor structures (e.g. Nitrides, Oxides, 2D Materials), and their heterostructures with superconductors, ferroelectrics and magnets, with device applications in energy-efficient transistors, light-emitting diodes and RF and power electronics and quantum computation and communications. The research from his group has been published in more than 500 journal papers including in Science, Nature, Physical Review Letters, Applied Physics Letters and Electron Device Letters and garnered multiple patents. His group's research has resulted in two spinoff companies (Soctera and Gallox). He is a fellow of the APS and the IEEE and is the winner of teaching awards and research awards such as the ISCS young scientist award in 2012, MBE young scientist award in 2014, the IBM faculty award in 2012, and the Intel Outstanding Research award in 2020. He is the author of the new textbook "Quantum Physics of Semiconductor Materials and Devices".