The physics behind the excitement lies in a deceptively simple scaling law. In rectifying power electronics, the Baliga figure of merit, which captures how well a semiconductor performs as a switch, is proportional to the bandgap raised to the power of 5.5. That steep exponent means that moving from silicon’s 1.1 electronvolts to gallium nitride’s 3.4 electronvolts already transforms what is possible in converters, chargers and grid infrastructure. Moving to a colossal bandgap above 6 electronvolts, the regime the Cornell-led team now enters, promises another leap in critical electric field and therefore in the voltage a device can block per unit thickness. Thinner devices switch faster, dissipate less heat and shrink the passive components around them, which is why the pursuit of ever-wider bandgaps has become one of the most competitive frontiers in materials science.

Yet widening the bandgap has historically come at a punishing cost: the loss of dopability. The defining trick of semiconductors is that their conductivity can be tuned over many orders of magnitude by deliberately introducing impurity atoms, a capability that underpins every transistor and diode ever made. As bandgaps grow, dopants tend to become so deeply bound that they fail to release their carriers at room temperature, and materials that were once dismissed as insulators, including gallium nitride, silicon carbide, aluminium nitride, gallium oxide and germanium oxide, only became useful semiconductors after years of work reducing defect densities and finding the right dopants. Diamond and cubic boron nitride, despite their superb intrinsic properties, remain locked behind enormous synthesis barriers: high pressures, tiny crystals, prohibitive costs and difficulty scaling. The new result breaks that trend by achieving record bandgap and record conductivity on one of the cheapest substrates in the industry.

The material at the heart of the study is the corundum-structured alloy α-(Al_xGa_1−x)₂O₃, in which gallium atoms in α-gallium oxide are progressively replaced by aluminium to widen the gap. The films were grown by suboxide molecular-beam epitaxy, a technique in which the metal sources are supplied as suboxides rather than pure elements, allowing adsorption-controlled growth of stoichiometric oxide films. The team grew the layers on sapphire, which is itself crystalline aluminium oxide, meaning the substrate is chemically identical to the aluminium-rich end of the alloy system. Sapphire is abundant, inexpensive, available in exceptional crystalline quality and produced at massive scale for everything from watch faces to LED wafers, with crystals as large as hundreds of kilograms grown by the Kyropoulos method. Building colossal-bandgap electronics on such a substrate is a decisive economic advantage over diamond and cubic boron nitride, which require high-pressure synthesis and yield only small, costly samples.

The headline number is conductivity. In the colossal-bandgap regime above 6 electronvolts, the silicon-doped α-(Al_xGa_1−x)₂O₃ films exhibit room-temperature conductivities more than 100 million times higher than all previous reports for materials in this range. Previous efforts to dope the corundum-structure alloy had achieved conductive films only up to bandgaps of about 6.22 electronvolts, and the conductivity collapsed rapidly as aluminium content rose. The new work shows that silicon, acting as a donor on the cation sublattice, can still ionize and release electrons even when the bandgap exceeds 7 electronvolts, provided the growth conditions are tuned correctly. Temperature-dependent Hall measurements on the films revealed carrier freeze-out as samples were cooled, allowing the researchers to extract donor densities and donor activation energies and to confirm that the conduction observed at room temperature arises from thermally activated, deliberately introduced silicon donors rather than accidental defects.

Characterizing such films demanded an unusually broad arsenal of techniques. High-resolution scanning transmission electron microscopy revealed atomically sharp, flat interfaces between the sapphire substrate, the buffer layers and the doped channel, with misfit dislocations confined to the earliest interface. Spectroscopic ellipsometry, performed at multiple angles of incidence and azimuthal orientations to account for the anisotropy of the corundum crystal structure, was used to determine the bandgap of each layer. Secondary ion mass spectrometry quantified the silicon incorporation down to a noise floor of roughly 1.2 times 10 to the 19 per cubic centimetre, while atom probe tomography mapped the three-dimensional distribution of silicon, aluminium and gallium atoms, showing that the alloy mixing follows a random, binomial distribution with no clustering. X-ray diffraction confirmed the crystal phase and composition of the doped overlayers through sharp reflections corresponding to aluminium fractions near 0.52.

Theory played an equal role in interpreting the results. Collaborators at the University of Texas at Austin, including Viet-Anh Ha, Nick Pant and Feliciano Giustino, calculated the theoretical electron mobilities of α-(Al_xGa_1−x)₂O₃ as a function of aluminium content and carrier density using density functional theory and electron-phonon coupling methods. Their calculations, which included phonon scattering, ionized impurity scattering and alloy scattering, and which accounted for the directional dependence of transport parallel and perpendicular to the basal plane, provided benchmarks against which the measured mobilities could be judged. Because the alloy is highly anisotropic, with bandgap energies and dielectric properties that depend on crystallographic direction, such first-principles guidance is essential for designing devices that exploit the material’s best transport directions.

Crucially, the team did not stop at films. They fabricated a Schottky barrier diode, dubbed the AlphaDiode, and a field-effect transistor, the AlphaFET, both with colossal-bandgap channels. The transistor structure stacked an aluminium-rich buffer on sapphire, a silicon-doped α-(Al_0.51Ga_0.49)₂O₃ channel, and a heavily doped regrown contact layer to achieve low-resistance ohmic access to the channel. The demonstration of both a rectifying diode and a transistor proves that the material can be patterned, contacted and switched, the minimum requirements for a practical electronic platform. These first devices are proof of concept rather than production-ready components, but they establish that doping, regrowth and contact formation, the traditional stumbling blocks for ultra-wide-bandgap materials, can all be executed on this oxide system.

The broader significance is strategic. Power electronics built on silicon carbide and gallium nitride are already reshaping electric vehicles, data centres and renewable energy systems, and gallium oxide in its beta phase has attracted intense interest because it can be grown from its own melt. The corundum-structure alloy reported here extends the reachable bandgap beyond anything doped before, and it does so on sapphire wafers that are already manufactured at scale, which the authors argue facilitates rapid development and adoption of colossal-bandgap electronics. The team has filed a provisional patent covering the growth procedure for conductive silicon-doped α-(Al,Ga)₂O₃ and the device structures that use it. Challenges certainly remain, including the modest mobilities typical of oxide alloys, deep donor levels that limit carrier activation, and the need for p-type doping, which remains unsolved. But the central barrier, the belief that semiconductors above 6 electronvolts cannot be made conductive, has now been decisively broken, and with it the assumption that the future of power electronics must be built on ever more expensive and difficult crystals.

Subject of Research: Silicon-doped α-(AlxGa1−x)2O3 as a record 7-eV bandgap semiconductor for colossal-bandgap power electronics

Article Title: A 7-eV bandgap semiconductor based on silicon-doped α-(AlxGa1−x)2O3

Article References: Steele, J., Bhattacharya, D., Nomoto, K., Pieczulewski, N. A., Sorensen, P., Ha, V.-A., Pant, N., Shukla, I., Das, S., Kilic, U., Ramesh, M., Giustino, F., Mazumder, B., Senevirathna, M. K. I., Williams, M. D., Schubert, M., Muller, D. A., Xing, H. G., Jena, D., & Schlom, D. G. (2026). A 7-eV bandgap semiconductor based on silicon-doped α-(AlxGa1−x)2O3. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-11085-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-11085-3

Keywords: colossal-bandgap semiconductor, alpha-gallium oxide, aluminum gallium oxide alloy, silicon doping, suboxide molecular-beam epitaxy, sapphire substrate, power electronics, Baliga figure of merit, Schottky diode, field-effect transistor, wide-bandgap materials, molecular-beam epitaxy

The excitement around PtSe2 stems from a remarkable property: its electronic character depends dramatically on how many atomic layers are stacked together. A single layer behaves as a true semiconductor with a bandgap of about 1.2 to 1.5 electron volts. Add a second layer and the gap collapses to roughly 0.3 electron volts; a third layer pushes it below 0.1 electron volts; and by four layers the material has become a semi-metal with no gap at all. This steep transition arises from strong interlayer coupling, and it cuts both ways. On one hand, it means a single material can serve as both the semiconducting channel and the metallic electrode in an all-PtSe2 transistor. On the other, it makes thickness control absolutely unforgiving: even a stray bilayer island in an otherwise monolayer film creates a semi-metallic leak path that would ruin a transistor’s ability to switch off.

That unforgiving requirement is precisely why monolayer PtSe2 has eluded researchers for so long. Earlier attempts using thermally assisted conversion, powder-source chemical vapor deposition, or molecular beam epitaxy produced nonuniform multilayer films, tiny grains of only 10 to 20 nanometers, or multilayer flakes dotted with small monolayer patches. None of these could deliver the precise thickness control and wafer-scale uniformity that transistor manufacturing demands. The new work overcomes this barrier through two clever chemical innovations: a custom-designed platinum precursor and an unexpected growth partner, oxygen gas.

The precursor, Pt(dipivaloylmethane-sulfonate)2, was synthesized specifically for thermal stability, refusing to decompose until temperatures reach approximately 300 degrees Celsius, higher than any other platinum precursor available. That stability matters because in a typical metal-organic deposition process, precursors that break apart too easily in the gas phase release highly reactive fragments that nucleate particles in mid-air, raining uncontrolled defects onto the growing film. By keeping the precursor intact until it reaches the heated substrate, the team suppressed these gas-phase reactions entirely, allowing the film to assemble itself in an orderly, layer-by-layer fashion at a growth temperature of 470 degrees Celsius on muscovite mica substrates.

Oxygen played an equally decisive role, and here the choice of material proved fortuitous. Metal-organic precursors carry organic ligands that, if left behind on the substrate, contaminate the film with amorphous carbon and create unwanted nucleation sites that shrink grain size. Most two-dimensional semiconductors, such as molybdenum disulfide, would be damaged by oxygen during growth, but PtSe2 belongs to the noble-metal dichalcogenides, which possess a high energy barrier to oxygen dissociation and are inherently resistant to oxidation. The researchers exploited this resilience by co-injecting a small, precisely metered flow of oxygen into the growth chamber. The oxygen triggers a combustion reaction that burns the organic ligands into volatile carbon dioxide and water vapor, sweeping them away while leaving the platinum and selenium atoms untouched to form pristine PtSe2.

The spectroscopic evidence for this chemistry is striking. Films grown with oxygen show no Raman signals in the 1300 to 1600 per centimeter range, where carbon’s characteristic D and G bands would appear, while films grown with hydrogen instead of oxygen display both bands, betraying amorphous carbon contamination. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy reinforced the picture: oxygen-grown films exhibited sharp, symmetric platinum 4f and selenium 3d peaks consistent with a clean, stoichiometric crystal, whereas hydrogen-grown films showed sub-stoichiometric phases and oxidized selenium species, signs that lingering organic residue had interfered with proper bonding. The team also demonstrated that the resulting films are exceptionally stable in air, with Raman peak positions shifting by less than 0.001 percent over seven months of ambient exposure.

Uniformity across the full substrate was verified through a battery of optical and structural measurements. Raman spectroscopy at 36 points across the film found the characteristic in-plane vibrational peak at 181.35 per centimeter, exactly where a monolayer should sit, with a standard deviation of just 0.16 per centimeter, and a narrow peak width indicating few point defects. Ultraviolet-visible absorption confirmed an optical bandgap of approximately 1.5 electron volts, matching theoretical predictions. Atomic force microscopy captured the growth in action: after four hours, triangular grains roughly 100 nanometers across had nucleated simultaneously and grown laterally, with step heights of 0.75 nanometer confirming single-layer thickness; after eight hours, the grains had merged into a fully continuous monolayer. The triangular grains even showed preferential alignment with the six-fold symmetry of the underlying mica, hinting that single-crystalline films may be within reach.

At the atomic scale, high-angle annular dark-field scanning transmission electron microscopy revealed the textbook 1T crystal structure, with each platinum atom coordinated by six selenium atoms and all three atomic sublayers clearly resolved. The measured lattice constant of 3.78 angstroms closely matched the theoretical value of 3.79 angstroms, and selected-area electron diffraction showed diffraction spots arranged in hexagonal patterns, confirming that most grains align with the mica substrate, though the film is not yet fully epitaxial.

The ultimate test came when the team fabricated arrays of bottom-gate field-effect transistors using the monolayer film as the channel, with standard photolithography, hafnium oxide gate dielectric, and gold contacts. The devices delivered a maximum on/off current ratio of 8.31 times ten to the fourth power and a minimum off-current of 3.40 times ten to the negative twelfth amperes per micrometer, the highest ratio and lowest off-current ever reported for PtSe2 film-based transistors. The large monolayer bandgap suppresses the thermally activated carriers that plague thicker, semi-metallic films in the off state. Field-effect mobility reached up to 1.37 square centimeters per volt-second, modest compared with the theoretical ceiling of nearly 1900 for monolayer PtSe2, a gap the researchers attribute to grain boundaries in the roughly 100-nanometer grains, transfer-related residues, interface traps at the dielectric, and unoptimized metal contacts, all of which they identify as targets for future optimization.

Beyond the record numbers, the significance of this work lies in its industrial compatibility. Metal-organic chemical vapor deposition is already the standard route for depositing thin films in commercial semiconductor fabs, and the growth temperature of 470 degrees Celsius is low enough for back-end integration schemes. By demonstrating that a properly designed precursor combined with oxygen-assisted ligand removal can tame a material whose layer count must be controlled to a single atomic plane, the team has established not just a new channel material candidate but a general framework for growing other emerging two-dimensional semiconductors at scale. If grain size and contact engineering can be improved in subsequent work, PtSe2 could graduate from laboratory curiosity to a serious contender in the post-silicon roadmap, with the added possibility that its own semi-metallic thicker form could one day serve as the contacts in entirely platinum-diselenide circuits.

Subject of Research: Oxygen-assisted MOCVD growth of semiconducting monolayer platinum diselenide films for field-effect transistors

Article Title: Oxygen‐Assisted MOCVD Growth of Monolayer PtSe2 Films With Bandgap Opening for Semiconducting FET Channels

Article References: Kim, Y., So, H.-S., Yoo, M., Oh, S., Kim, D., Gyeon, M., Jo, M.-K., Noh, G., Kim, T. S., Kim, M.-G., Park, J., Chai, H.-J., Kang, M., Kim, S., Ham, A., Lee, J., Lim, J., Song, S., Kwak, J. Y., … Kang, K. (2026). Oxygen‐Assisted MOCVD Growth of Monolayer PtSe 2 Films With Bandgap Opening for Semiconducting FET Channels. Advanced Science, 13(53), Article e76362. https://doi.org/10.1002/advs.76362

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1002/advs.76362

Keywords: PtSe2, two-dimensional materials, MOCVD, monolayer semiconductor, field-effect transistor, bandgap engineering, transition metal dichalcogenides, nanoelectronics, thin film growth, oxygen-assisted growth, crystallography, semiconductor manufacturing