Institute of High Pressure Physics

Is it possible to melt GaN like other semiconductors: silicon or GaAs? What temperature and pressure is needed? Theoretical physicists from Institute of High Pressure Physics PAS made an important step towards solving this fundamental question. The results of their calculations were recently published in Chemistry of Materials (Impact factor 10.5) by J. Piechota, S. Krukowski, B. Sadovyi, P. Sadovyi, S. Porowski and I. Grzegory, in a publication entitled “Melting versus Decomposition of GaN: Ab Initio Molecular Dynamics Study and Comparison to Experimental Data” Chem. Mater. 2023, 35, 18, 7694–7707 doi: 10.1021/acs.chemmater.3c01477.

Authors determined the conditions in which the N₂ molecules are found, thus being a fingerprint of GaN decomposition, in contrast to higher pressures >15GPa at 4000K that indicate the possibility of GaN melting. Importantly the results of previous experimental work are now being confirmed by theoretical calculations which well justifies the use of the chosen method for modeling and designing difficult experiments to determine the melting curve of GaN.