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Opening of the Warsaw-4-PhD Academic Year

Monday, 06 October 2025 11:11 |

The Institute of High Pressure Physics PAS organized and led the inauguration of the 2025/2026 academic year of Warsaw-4-PhD - the Warsaw PhD School in Natural and BioMedical Sciences.

The ceremony took place on October 1, 2025 and it was kindly hosted free of charge in the auditorium of the Institute of Physical Chemistry PAS at Kasprzaka 44/52 in Warsaw.

Inauguration was opened by Prof. Michał Boćkowski, Director of the Institute of High Pressure Physics. The highlights included PhD student presentations, the inaugural lecture by Prof. Sylwester Porowski, and the doctoral oath.

We thank IChF PAS for their hospitality and all attendees for joining us.

WBG Pilot Line has kicked off - the consortium’s first meeting in Rome

Thursday, 25 September 2025 15:01 |

We have launched work on the European WBG Pilot Line project - a joint “lab-to-fab” pilot line for wide-bandgap semiconductors (SiC, GaN, and UWBG) designed to strengthen the entire European value chain and accelerate industrial deployments in high value-added applications.

Our Institute contributes unique ammonothermal GaN substrates to the consortium and is developing manufacturing technologies for power and RF structures on 4-inch and larger GaN substrates as part of the Polish node of the pilot line.

The project is based on the infrastructure of partners from Italy, Poland, Sweden, Finland, France, Austria, and Germany, and is closely linked to the Chips for Europe initiative. More details under this link.

A new approach to studying the nature of point defects in diluted AlxGa1-xN layers - the influence of the alloying effect

Wednesday, 17 September 2025 09:26 |

In the latest paper "Deep-level point defects at Ga sites in dilute Al_xGa_1−xN alloys" our colleague, Dr. Piotr Kruszewski, along with collaborators, presented new evidence indicating that the electron trap E1 in Al_xGa_1−xN layers - and likely also in GaN - is associated with a point defect located in the gallium sublattice, rather than the nitrogen sublattice, as was commonly believed. Additionally, based on theoretical calculations (Heyd-Scuseria-Ernzerhof - HSE), it was proposed that the donor responsible for the electronic level of the E1 trap is either carbon or molybdenum, corresponding to C_Ga(0/+) or Mo_Ga(0/+), respectively.

The paper has been highlighted as the Applied Physics Letters Editor's Pick and is available here: https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0272389

Invited talk at PASREG2025

Wednesday, 10 September 2025 10:26 |

The International Workshop on Processing and Applications of Superconducting (RE)BCO Materials (PASREG 2025) is scheduled to take place in Tokyo, Japan, from November 28 to 30, 2025. The PASREG 2025 workshop will emphasize key aspects of the fabrication, characterization, and magnetization techniques of both high-temperature and conventional superconductor bulks. Additionally, the workshop will explore innovative applications of superconductor bulks and discuss recent developments in applied superconductivity.

In this international workshop, Prof. Shiv J. Singh from our institute has been invited to deliver a talk entitled “Superconducting properties of bulk Sm-based oxypnictide processed by high gas pressure, cubic anvil, and spark plasma sintering techniques.” This lecture will provide a brief overview of the current findings from Prof. Singh's research team on high-T_c iron-based superconducting bulks, which have been processed using both conventional and various high-pressure techniques.

More details about this workshop can be found here: https://smartconf.jp/content/pasreg2025/program

Public defense of the PhD dissertation of Julia Sławińska, MSc

Monday, 29 September 2025 16:10 |

A public defense of the doctoral dissertation of Julia Sławińska, MSc Eng, will be held on 10 October 2025 (Friday) at 12:00 p.m. in the seminar room of the Institute of High Pressure Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences, in Warsaw, 29/37 Sokołowska St.

Dissertation title: Ion implanted (In,Ga)N micro-light-emitting diodes with tunnel junction

Full text of the announcement

The dissertation and reviews are available here

Elastic anisotropy in titanium alloys

Thursday, 25 September 2025 11:33 |

Elastic isotropy is a phenomenon in which a material responds uniformly to stress, regardless of its direction. In the case of cubic crystals, which possess distinct crystallographic directions, this is an unusual manifestation of quantum mechanics in macroscopic objects. This crystal behavior cannot be explained within the framework of classical physics. This phenomenon is closely related to the balancing of internal forces resulting from Coulomb interactions, Pauli repulsion, and band overlap under the influence of stress on the crystal.

In the recent paper by C. Sobczak, P. Kwasniak, P. Strak, M. Muzyk, and S. Krukowski, "Elastic Anisotropy in BCC Ti-X Alloys (X = V, Nb, Ta) Determined from First Principles," published in Materials, 2025, 18(18), 4294, our PhD student Cyprian Sobczak described the anisotropy of titanium alloy crystals. This work was developed in collaboration between a group of theoreticians from our Institute and from the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw.

Authors identificatied a new titanium-niobium alloy with a 53% niobium content, Ti-53Nb, exhibiting elastic isotropy. Calculations also showed that this phenomenon cannot occur in the case of titanium-tantalum alloys, Ti-Ta, regarding the mechanical stability of these alloys. The publication summarizes the main trends exhibited by the elastic constants, Young's modulus, and bulk modulus of the Ti-based alloys discussed, based on ab initio methods. See more details here.

Figure. A comparison of trends observed in Ti-X alloys (X = V, Nb, Ta, Mo): (a) C11 elastic constant, (b) C12 elastic constant, (c) C44 elastic constant, (d) C′ = (C11 − C12)/2, (e) bulk modulus B, and (f) Young’s modulus E, determined using PBE.

Invited talk at EMRS 2025 Fall Meeting

Wednesday, 10 September 2025 10:39 |

At the upcoming EMRS Fall Meeting 2025, in Symposium I - Frontiers of imaging and spectroscopy in transmission electron microscopy, dr hab. inż. Julita Smalc-Koziorowska will present an invited paper entitled. "Revealing defects in nitride semiconductor structures in TEM".

The 2025 Fall Meeting of the European Materials Research Society (E-MRS) will take place from September 15 to 18, 2025 at the main campus of the University of Technology in Warsaw (Poland) and will consist of 23 parallel symposia with invited speakers, oral and poster presentations assorted by one plenary session to provide an international forum for discussing recent advances in the field of materials science.

New multilayer design of metal to p-type GaN contact

Sunday, 07 September 2025 15:45 |

One of the most formidable barriers in development of nitride-based optoelectronic devices: laser diodes (LDs) and light emitting diodes (LEDs) is high resistance of the metal/p-type nitride contact. The present date solutions are mostly based on Ni/Au contact still they are far from satisfactory. The situation requires basic investigations of the contact nature and technical implementation of new designs. Researchers from IHPP PAS applied complex ab initio and drift-diffusion calculation to elucidate contact nature. The results obtained include:

elucidation of basic nature of the contact,
evidence that in any metal/p-type GaN contact there exist tunneling barrier,
explanation of the role of oxygen-ambient annealing during formation of the Ni-Au contact,
new design, based on multilayer arrangement of deep acceptors, to achieve low resistance contact.

These results were published in the paper in Electronics vol. 14, p. 3309 (2025): Fundamentals of Metal Contact to p-Type GaN—A New Multilayer Energy-Saving Design Konrad Sakowski, Cyprian Sobczak, Pawel Strak, Stanislaw Krukowski

This study opens a new possibility of application of the new design by implantation formation of the low resistance electric contacts in the near future.

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