Effective electronic band structure of monoclinic β−(AlxGa1−x)2O3 alloy semiconductor

In this article, the electronic band structure of a β−(AlxGa1−x)2O3 alloy system is calculated, with β−Ga2O3 as the bulk crystal. The technique of band unfolding is implemented to obtain an effective band structure for aluminum fractions varying between 12.5% and 62.5% with respect to gallium atoms. A 160-atom supercell is used to model the disordered system that is generated using the technique of special quasi-random structures, which mimics the site correlation of a truly random alloy by reducing the number of candidate structures that arise due to the large number of permutations possible for alloy occupation sites. The impact of the disorder is then evaluated on the electron effective mass and bandgap, which is calculated under the generalized gradient approximation.