Beyond Epitaxy: (U)WBG Semiconductor and Quantum Materials

Speaker

Xiuling Li

• Truchard Foundation Endowed Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin

About This Talk

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.

About the Speaker

Xiuling Li received her B.S. from Peking University and Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles. Following postdoctoral positions at the California Institute of Technology and University of Illinois, as well as industry experience at Coherent Inc. (formerly EpiWorks Inc.), she joined the faculty of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 2007. At UIUC, she was the Donald Biggar Willett Professor in Engineering, the interim director of the Nick Holonyak Jr. Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory, and the founding director of an NSF IUCRC center. She joined the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin in August 2021. She currently holds the Truchard Foundation Endowed Chair in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and serves as the founding co-director of the Texas Quantum Institute.

Her research focuses on semiconductor materials and devices. She has published more than 180 journal papers, holds more than 25 patents, and has delivered more than 180 invited lectures worldwide. She has been honored with the NSF CAREER Award, DARPA Young Faculty Award, and ONR Young Investigator Award, the IEEE Pioneer Award in Nanotechnology, and the IEEE Photonics Society Engineering Achievement Award.

She is a Fellow of IEEE, the American Physical Society (APS), the Optical Society (OSA), the National Academy of Inventors (NAI), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Among her service to professional societies, she was the vice president of finance and administration and an elected member of the board of governors of the IEEE Photonics Society, chair of the IEEE Andrew Grove Award committee, and an executive committee member of the APS Division of Materials Physics. She has been a deputy editor of Applied Physics Letters since 2015.

About the MSE Seminar Series

The Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) Seminar Series features distinguished speakers from leading institutions, offering a platform for sharing groundbreaking research, innovative ideas, and entrepreneurial experiences. Held multiple times each semester, these seminars bring global perspectives world to MIT’s materials research community, exposing students, faculty, and postdocs to cutting-edge concepts and valuable networking opportunities.