Work function of different materials

Of course I would rather be interested in the electron affinity for semiconductors!

If you are really interested in getting electrons out of a solid and into vacuum, there was a review of work function data (certainly on semiconductors, I believe that it also covered metals) by G.W. Gobeli and F.G. Allen in the mid

1960s. I think it was in one of the volumes of the Willardson and Beer series. The people who are able to get data on this sort of thing are those who have x-ray photoemission spectroscopy setups. There has been a group at the Rockwell Science Center (or whatever it is nowadays) doing this for a long time: J.R. Waldrop, R.W. Grant, et al., but I don't know if they ever looked at oxides.

On the other hand, if you really want to infer energy-level alignments at some solid-solid interface, you should be aware that, though widely quoted and believed, work-function and electron-affinity rules are not in fact correct. (Herb Kroemer published several papers in the mid 1970s on this topic.) Now, it is true that such rules are most accurate when one of the materials is a reasonably ionic, wide bandgap material (Paper by Tom McGill, Carver Mead, early 1970s as I recall, on systematics of Schottky barriers.) But, if your application is really to interface alignments, it is much better to seek data directly on the interface of interest.

- Bill Frensley

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Thank you very much for your pointers. In fact, I was mainly looking for data on metal/semiconductor contacts. I am aware of problems with the correctness of this approach, but the vacuum work functions give at least some ballpark numbers.

I found a lot of data I was looking for in the following paper and the quoted references:

@article{XU:2000, author="Xu, Y. and Schoonen, M.A.", title="The absolute energy positions of conduction and valence bands of selected semiconducting minerals", journal="American Mineralogist", year=2000, volume="85", pages="543--556", }