LAUSR

Abstract Boron nitride nanocrystalline thin-film is a kind of wide bandgap semiconductor material with important applications. Before implementation of BN applications, determining the BN Work function and electron affinity are very necessary. In this paper, these properties of sp2-bonded nanocrystalline BN were studied. Based on the data from Kelvin Probe and ultraviolet–visible absorption spectroscopy measurements, the preliminary results of Fermi level and electron affinity can be obtained. Furthermore, we utilized Metal-Semiconductor (MS) contact as an access to validate these results. The MS contact Cu/BN schottky junction is analyzed based on the MS contact Thermionic Emission (TE) model. According to the relationship between current and temperature under different voltage, the value of field independent barrier height can be evaluated as 0.59eV. Consider all the data, we can calculate the conduction band minimum (CBM), which is also named as electron affinity, and valence band maximum (VBM) of BN as −3.74eV and −9.60eV respectively, relative to vacuum energy level.