BONUS

The BONUS consortium aims at fabricating light-emitting devices for the deep ultraviolet (UV) by using hexagonal boron nitride (hBN). Such an objective requires to go beyond the existing collaborations and established contacts. The BONUS partners have to combine their work force, get funding for their activities and reach the synergy necessary for the realization of this project which is new, ambitious and high-risk. The BONUS consortium will answer to the EU call FET-Open Challenging Current Thinking (FETOPEN-01-2018-2019-2020) which deadline is May 13th, 2020. The provisional planning comprises two meetings in Montpelier, which will be the highlights of the proposition preparation before the submission of the BONUS project. The ANR-MRSEI grant will be decisive for the organization of these two meetings. The deep UV range (UVC-?<280 nm) is a strategic spectral domain, with numerous applications requiring the development of technological solutions which are cheap, compact and have a low energy consumption. The applications lie within the fields of chemistry and biology (for photo-catalysis, sterilization, and water-purification) but also of short-distance telecommunications in opaque atmosphere. Today, the only available devices are spectral lamps which are not compact, have a short lifetime and a low energy efficiency. The BONUS consortium proposes a radical new vision for the development of light-emitting devices in the deep UV. Instead of pursuing solutions in the mainstream AlGaN field, the BONUS partners intend to explore the extraordinary potential of hBN. Although hBN is a nitride semiconductor, its originality goes well beyond having the lightest cation (boron atom). hBN is a lamellar compound like graphite. Many unusual and fascinating properties derive from this structure, ranging from the genuine hyperbolicity in the mid-infrared, the existence of single photon sources, to a bright emission in the deep UV. hBN is a peculiar material, for which the study of its fundamental properties was triggered in 2004 by the first high-quality crystals grown by Watanabe and Taniguchi. In the last few years, the BONUS partners have become major players in the field with state-of-the-art contributions in epitaxy, characterization and spectroscopy. The BONUS consortium is composed of 6 partners (5 academic and 1 industrial) from 5 countries (France, Germany, UK, Spain and Switzerland). The fabrication of light-emitting devices in the deep UV relies on the epitaxy of hBN layers of high crystalline quality. Without epitaxy, it will be impossible to develop UV sources which are compact, cheap, efficient and with a long lifetime. Epitaxy is the absolute requirement for a disruptive technology in deep UV opto-electronics, with solid-state hBN-based devices. The composition of the BONUS consortium reflects this strategic priority with 3 partners working on epitaxy: AIXTRON (Germany), Nottingham University (UK) and GT-CNRS (Metz-France). The other 3 partners of BONUS bring complementary expertises in optical spectroscopy (L2C-CNRS, Montpellier-France), Raman characterization (CSIC, Barcelona-Spain) and the synthesis of bulk hBN crystals for homo-epitaxy (ETHZ, Zurich-Switzerland).