We’re thrilled to announce the winner of the Analytical Instrumentation Facility (AIF) Spooky Image Contest! A huge congratulations to Michael Carter, whose entry titled “Bend Contours in Gallium Nitride” has been selected as the winner.

This contest marked AIF’s first ever Halloween-themed image competition, a fun, creative way for users of NC State’s materials-characterization facility to highlight the hauntingly beautiful under‐the‐microscope world of advanced materials. The “spooky” theme encouraged participants to think beyond traditional imaging to find dramatic, eerie, or visually striking representations of materials that might otherwise go unseen.

Michael is a PhD candidate in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at NC State. He captured his winning image using the Talos TEM microscope. This is a TEM lamella of a III-Nitride heterostructure containing (from top to bottom) InN, GaN, and AlN grown on a sapphire substrate. This image was taken using STEM conditions with strain contrast, so the overall bending of the lamella can be seen as dark lines that look like the face of an eldritch horror. Besides the bending, which resulted from the FIB liftout process, the lamella also shows a high concentration of strain localized at the InN/GaN interface, which was the focus of this analysis.

Further analysis indicated a high density of misfit dislocations at the InN/GaN interface which do not propagate up through the InN layer. These results are being used to work towards optical and electrical devices based on InN, which has not been extensively researched yet.

For future integration of InN into optical and electronic devices, it is extremely important to optimize the growth of InN, including management of extended defects like dislocations. This work characterized the formation and propagation of dislocations when InN is grown on GaN.

Michael Carter

PhD Candidate, MSE

Other Submissions

Congratulations again to Michael and thank you to everyone who engaged and submitted. Your work continues to make scientific imaging not only insightful but also inspiring.

We can’t wait to see what happens in next year’s, perhaps even spookier, edition!

This post was originally published in Analytical Instrumentation Facility (AIF).