Materials Science and Engineering Seminar - Professor Xiuling Li from The University of Texas at Austin (Building 6, Room 104)

Semiconductor functionality is governed not only by intrinsic material properties, but also by defects, interfaces, surfaces, strain, and electronic states introduced during growth and fabrication. Xiuling Li, of the University of Texas at Austin, combines MOCVD epitaxy with unconventional nanofabrication to understand and exploit these coupled effects in (U)wide bandgap semiconductor and quantum materials, enabling applications from ferroelectric and reconfigurable GaN electronics to single-photon emitters, high-resolution microLEDs, and compact 3D RF systems.

In this seminar, Li will discuss MOCVD growth of emerging nitride materials, including ferroelectric AlScN and materials for single-photon emitters, with an emphasis on how growth kinetics, strain, impurities, and defect formation control functional properties. She will then introduce metal-assisted chemical etching (MacEtch), a near-room-temperature, open-circuit, plasma-free anisotropic etching process driven by localized catalytic electron transfer. Beyond enabling high-aspect-ratio structures in GaN and β-Ga₂O₃-based materials, Li will highlight its application to GaN microLED scaling, where sidewall effects become increasingly important at the few-micron scale. Finally, she will briefly highlight her strain-driven self-rolled-up membrane (S-RuM) platform, in which built-in strain transforms planar thin films into three-dimensional structures for device miniaturization, integration, and tuning. Ultimately, Li’s research aims to actively control defects, surfaces, strain, and dimensionality as co-designed degrees of freedom to engineer semiconductor and quantum materials.