Growth of III‐Nitrides
Authors: Toropov Alexey , Ivanov Sergey 
Published: March 2013

The 4th International Symposium on Growth of III‐Nitrides (ISGN4) was held in Saint‐Petersburg, Russia, July 16–19, 2012. This is a rather new symposium series started in 2006 (Linköping, Sweden) and continued in 2008 (Izu, Japan) and 2010 (Montpellier, France). It supplements two big biennial alternating III‐nitride meetings, IWN and ICNS, focusing directly on key issues of III‐nitride technology. The 4th Symposium was organized by the Ioffe Physical‐Technical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

The attendance of the symposium was most world‐wide and largest as compared with previous ones in the series, which caused organizers to extend the symposium duration from three to four days. The symposium brought together 248 scientists from 24 countries, with Japan and Russia sharing a leadership in numbers. About sixty of them were young scientists. The Program Committee selected 209 papers (of 227 abstracts) for presentation, including 47 oral papers. In addition, one plenary lecture by Prof. Nicolas Grandjean (EPFL) and 22 invited papers were proposed. All the plenary, invited, and oral papers were presented, and 162 posters were displayed during two poster sessions. The present proceedings volume of physica status solidi includes 72 papers from the symposium accepted for publication.

The symposium covered all aspects of growth and studies of bulk materials (AlN, GaN, InN) and their alloys, as well as fabrication of templates, epitaxial layers, and low‐dimensional nanostructures, and also considered novel device concepts for optoelectronics and electronics. Practically all employed and newly developed growth techniques, novel characterization tools, and device breakthroughs were discussed there. Recently, several important discoveries have been made in different fields of III‐nitride technology. Among them are the development of various technologies of high‐quality bulk GaN and AlN crystals suitable for fabrication of polar, semi‐ and non‐polar epitaxial substrates, resulting in demonstration of efficient blue‐green laser diodes (520–540 nm), deep UV light‐emitting diodes (LEDs), and low‐threshold optically pumped lasers in the 250–300 nm range. Recent progress in plasma‐assisted molecular beam epitaxy has led to elaboration of AlGaN/GaN cubic low‐dimensional structures, 3D nanostructured LEDs, and a novel type of quantum cascade emitters aimed at the IR and THz spectral ranges. The technological advances have been supported by deep fundamental studies of structural, optical and electrical properties, using sophisticated experimental tools. All these issues were presented and discussed in the ISGN4 Scientific Program.

The Editors would like to thank all the members of the International Advisory Committee and the International Program Committee for their encouragement and great help during the symposium organization. We are grateful to the referees for their effort and time devoted to the paper review process. We appreciate very much the managers and technical staff of the Hotel “Saint‐Petersburg”. We owe our best thanks to the official partners and sponsors of the symposium listed on the following pages for their substantial support. Eleven companies all over the world listed below, which manufacture scientific and technological equipment and materials for the III–N field, took part in the symposium exhibition. Finally, we would also like to express our sincere gratitude to Dr. Stefan Hildebrandt, Editor‐in‐Chief of physica status solidi, for his friendly assistance and collaboration in the editorial process.

The next 5th International Symposium on Growth of III‐Nitrides (ISGN5) will be held in May 2014 in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. We wish the organizers a gorgeous and successful meeting.