Kyma Technologies, Inc., a leading supplier of crystalline aluminum nitride (AlN) and gallium nitride (GaN) materials and related process equipment and services, today acknowledged their role in helping Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) scientists demonstrate a novel approach to making mid-infrared (mid-IR) non-linear optics, which are important for a number of commercial and defense applications.

Today’s most prevalent approaches to non-linear mid-IR optical materials are based on periodically poled lithium niobate and related materials and suffer from a dramatic drop-off in performance in the wavelength region beyond 4 microns. NRL’s approach is dramatically different – they alternate the actual crystal orientation of the semiconducting nonlinear material—to create promising structures from gallium nitride (GaN) grown by hydride vapor phase epitaxy (HVPE).

To read more about NRL advances in this area see:

1. “Periodically oriented GaN shows feasibility for mid-IR nonlinear optics,” by John Wallace, Laser Focus World, Oct. 9, 2012, http://www.laserfocusworld.com/articles/print/volume-48/issue-10/newsbreaks/periodically-oriented-gan-shows-feasibility-for-mid-ir-nonlinear-optics.html.
2. “Development of periodically oriented gallium nitride for non-linear optics,” by Jennifer Hite, et al., Optical Materials Express, Vol. 2, Issue 9, pp. 1203-1208 (2012), http://dx.doi.org/10.1364/OME.2.001203.

Kyma’s HVPE GaN has very low impurity levels and low defect densities which supports a large transparency window all the way out to 7 microns, a high thermal conductivity (~250 W/m-K), and a high second-order nonlinear susceptibility, all important for non-linear optics applications.

About Kyma Technologies

Kyma is a leading provider of crystalline nitride semiconductor materials, device, and equipment solutions for energy efficient lighting and electric power management.

The market for nitride semiconductor devices was approximately $9B in 2011, and is expected to surpass $60B over the long term, including $30B in visible lighting applications and $30B in power electronics applications.

For more information about Kyma Technologies, visit www.kymatech.com, e-mail info@kymatech.com, or call the company directly at 919.789.8880.

Kyma is a registered trademark of Kyma Technologies, Inc.