Research Visit to KAUST, Saudi Arabia

20 Dec 2014

Michelle Conroy 3rd year Ph.D. student is currently interning in Prof. Boon Ooi’s research group in King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia.

She has grown III-N nanorod structures by molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) in Prof. Ooi’s group on sapphire templates fabricated in Tyndall before leaving for KAUST. The resulting growth so far has shown the first structurally uniform close packed wafer scale AlN nanorods by a self-limiting lateral growth mechanism.

These nanorod patterns will provide a defect free semipolar template for DUV LED growth overcoming the spontaneous piezoelectric effect naturally occurring in polar templates that affects the LED efficiency drastically. During her internship in KAUST she has attended and presented her work at the Nanotechnology Conference held in KACST, Riyadh, where the work achieved through collaborations between KAUST and UCSB in optoelectronics was presented by 2014 Noble prize winner Shuji Nakamura.