Yttrium nitride, YN, is a

nitride In chemistry, a nitride is a chemical compound of nitrogen. Nitrides can be inorganic or organic, ionic or covalent. The nitride anion, N3−, is very elusive but compounds of nitride are numerous, although rarely naturally occurring. Some nitr ...

yttrium Yttrium is a chemical element; it has Symbol (chemistry), symbol Y and atomic number 39. It is a silvery-metallic transition metal chemically similar to the lanthanides and has often been classified as a "rare-earth element". Yttrium is almost a ...

. Yttrium nitride is hard ceramic material similar to

titanium nitride Titanium nitride (TiN; sometimes known as tinite) is an extremely hard ceramic material, often used as a physical vapor deposition (PVD) coating on titanium alloys, steel, carbide, and aluminium components to improve the substrate's surface prop ...

and zirconium nitride. The nitrides of

lanthanum Lanthanum is a chemical element; it has symbol La and atomic number 57. It is a soft, ductile, silvery-white metal that tarnishes slowly when exposed to air. It is the eponym of the lanthanide series, a group of 15 similar elements bet ...

scandium Scandium is a chemical element; it has Symbol (chemistry), symbol Sc and atomic number 21. It is a silvery-white metallic d-block, d-block element. Historically, it has been classified as a rare-earth element, together with yttrium and the lantha ...

, and

show semiconducting properties and additionally the lattice structure of YN differs only by 8% from that of

gallium nitride Gallium nitride () is a binary III/ V direct bandgap semiconductor commonly used in blue light-emitting diodes since the 1990s. The compound is a very hard material that has a Wurtzite crystal structure. Its wide band gap of 3.4 eV af ...

. This makes YN a possible buffer layer between a substrate and the GaN layer during GaN crystal growth.

References

* * * * Nitrides Yttrium compounds Rock salt crystal structure {{inorganic-compound-stub