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Free-carrier screening unlocks high electron mobility in ultrawide bandgap semiconductor CaSnO$_3$

Materials Science 2025-09-10 v1

Abstract

Alkaline earth stannates have emerged as promising transparent conducting oxides due to their wide band gaps and high room-temperature electron mobilities. Among them, CaSnO3_3 possesses the widest band gap, yet reported mobilities vary widely and are highly sample-dependent, leaving its intrinsic limit unclear. Here, we present ab initio calculations of electron mobility in CaSnO3_3 across a range of temperatures and doping levels, using state-of-the-art methods that explicitly account for free-carrier screening in electron-phonon interactions. We identify the dominant limiting mechanism to be the long-range longitudinal optical phonon scattering, which is significantly suppressed at high doping due to free-carrier screening, leading to enhanced phonon-limited mobility. While ionized impurity scattering emerges as a competing mechanism at carrier concentrations up to ~1020^{20} cm3^{-3}, the phonon scattering reduction dominates, yielding a net mobility increase with predicted room-temperature values reaching about twice the highest experimental report. Our work highlights the substantial untapped conductivity in CaSnO3_3, establishing it as a compelling ultrawide bandgap semiconductor for transparent and high-power electronic applications.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.00307,
  title  = {Free-carrier screening unlocks high electron mobility in ultrawide bandgap semiconductor CaSnO$_3$},
  author = {Jiayi Gong and Chuanyu Zhang and Wenjie Hu and Jin-Jian Zhou},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.00307},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

5 pages, 4 figures, accepted by Appl. Phys. Lett