Novel Dilute Bismides for IR Optoelectronics Applications

III-V-Bi compounds reveal a number of attractive physical properties promising for novel IR optoelectronic applications [1,2] and have received considerable attention as witnessed by the dedicated international workshops on this topic in the consecutive past four years. The isoelectronic nature of Bi atoms in III-Vs induces strong interactions with the energy bands of host materials leading to large band-gap reduction, less temperature sensitive band-gap and large spin-orbit split band. So far the most studied material is Ga(N)AsBi, while other dilute bismides have also been reported recently. In this paper, we shall briefly review several novel bismides: GaSbBi, InSbiBi, InAsBi, InPBi and InGaAsBi, and the Bi surfactant effect from our group, all grown by molecular beam epitaxy (MBE).