The SrS doped with Cl and K: a promising ambipolar semiconductor for transparent electronics application

Abstract

Abstract Wide-gap semiconductors are essential for current optoelectronics due to the good conductivity and transparency. Although the significant successes have been achieved for n-type transparent conducting materials (TCMs), the p-type TCMs seriously lag behind the n-type counterparts, which severely hinder the developments of the high-performance transparent electronic devices. In present work, we predict the transparent ambipolar conducting can be obtained in SrS by utilizing the hybrid functional method. The Cl substituting S and K substituting Sr (labeled as ClS and KSr) are typical shallow donor and acceptor defects. Compared to conduction band minimum (valence band maximum), the ionization energies for ClS (KSr) would converge to 0.02 (0.14) eV. Using the equilibrium fabricate method, the free electrons (holes) density can reach 1.24 × 1019 cm−3 (1.23 × 1018 cm−3) at room temperature. The effective masses for electron and hole are 0.32 and 0.87 m 0 (m 0 is the mass of a free electron). In the visible light regions, the high transparency can be kept due to its weak inter-band and intra-band absorptions as well as the negligible plasmonic effect. High density of carriers, smaller effective mass and high transparency show SrS doped with Cl and K is a promising ambipolar transparent semiconductor. This work provides insights to realize the high performance ambipolar TCMs. Once the excellent ambipolar TCMs is explored, the high-performance transparent devices are expected in the future.