Free-carrier screening unlocks high electron mobility in ultrawide bandgap semiconductor CaSnO3
Alkaline earth stannates have emerged as promising transparent conducting oxides due to their wide bandgaps and high room-temperature electron mobilities. Among them, CaSnO3 possesses the widest bandgap, 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 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 cm−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, establishing it as a compelling ultrawide bandgap semiconductor for transparent and high-power electronic applications.
Authors
- Chuanyu Zhang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0973-0136)
- Wenjie Hu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0001-8020-8981)
- Jin-Jian Zhou (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1182-9186)
- Jiayi Gong
Institutions
- Beijing Institute of Technology (CN)
- Chengdu University of Information Technology (CN)
- Chengdu University of Technology (CN)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Applied Physics Letters
- Published
- 2025-09-01
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0282908
- Primary Topic
- Electronic and Structural Properties of Oxides
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- National Natural Science Foundation of China
- Beijing Municipal Natural Science Foundation
- National Key Research and Development Program of China