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Condensed-matter physics

Hydrogen falls into line

Nature volume 423, pages 595–596 (2003)Cite this article

Hydrogen ions, both positive and negative, have a pervasive influence on the properties of materials and solutions. A unified picture of the behaviour of these ions has now been drawn.

The role of hydrogen in controlling electrochemical activity is essential to your life and to the life of your computer. The former is well known to any student of chemistry, as the pH of aqueous solutions is defined by the concentration of H+ ions. The crossover from a dominance of H+ to OH− defines the transition from acidic to alkaline solutions, which has profound consequences for chemical and biological processes. Perhaps less well known is that hydrogen is also essential for the operation and lifetime of every modern solid-state electronic device. The ability of hydrogen to take on either of two charge states, H+ or H−, means that it can 'passivate' electrically active defects of either sign in the device material. Introducing hydrogen into the processing makes it possible to achieve the perfection required to reliably produce millions of transistors on a chip. On page 626 of this issue, Van de Walle and Neugebauer1 propose that these two phenomena are closely related: in fact, they claim to have found a universal alignment of the electrochemical level for the change of charge state of hydrogen complexes across a wide range of materials.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. the Department of Physics, University of Illinois, 1110 West Green Street, Urbana, 61801, Illinois, USA

    Richard M. Martin

  2. the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, 7000 East Avenue, Livermore, 94550, California, USA

    Giulia Galli

Authors
  1. Richard M. Martin
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  2. Giulia Galli
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Correspondence to Richard M. Martin or Giulia Galli.

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Martin, R., Galli, G. Hydrogen falls into line. Nature 423, 595–596 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1038/423595a

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