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 352 || AWSAR Awarded Popular Science Stories - 2019
A Tale of Hidden Treasures at the Junctions in the Flatland
  Ms. Medha Dandu*
Email: medha@iisc.ac.in
Miniaturization of electronics has brought information sharing and data computing at our fingertips today. Rapid
advancements in semiconductor technology continuously boost the speed, compactness, functionalities and applications of electronic devices. One such development is the design of electronic devices with semiconductor heterojunctions. These heterojunctions are built by integrating multiple semiconductor materials with different properties in a desired sequence to get the required output. In our daily life, we enjoy the comfort of speed and efficiency provided by such heterojunctions as they are an integral part of smartphones and LED lights.
Materials used to design a heterojunction is based on device specifications. The key
factors are how fast can the charge flow through the material and its bandgap. The bandgap defines the gap between the lowest unoccupied energy states called conduction band and the highest occupied energy states called valence band. The region of junction between two different materials where the bandgapchangesdetermineshowthecharge flows across the device. “Interface is the device” an introductory sentence of Nobel lecture in 2000 by Herbert Kroemer aptly summarizes the nitty-gritty physics of devices made from semiconductor heterojunctions where the interface predominantly determines how the device operates. The concept of heterojunction is indispensable in semiconductor technology as even a device made from a single material must be interfaced
 * Ms. Medha Dandu, PhD Scholar from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, is pursuing her research on “Engineering Charge and Energy Transport in Heterostructures of 2D Materials for Efficient Optoelectronic Devices”. Her popular science story entitled “A Tale of Hidden Treasures at the Junctions in the Flatland” has been selected for AWSAR Award.


























































































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