Strong Light-Matter Interactions in Heterostructures of Atomically Thin Films

By L. Britnell, R. Ribeiro, A. Eckmann, R. Jalil, B. Belle, A. Mishchenko, Y.J. Kim, R. Gorbachev, T. Georgiou, S. Morozov and 5 more. Science, 2013

2,260 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Atomic Layer Heterostructures—More Is More The isolation of stable layers of various materials, only an atom or several atoms thick, has provided the opportunity to fabricate devices with novel functionality and to probe fundamental physics. Britnell et al. (p. 1311, published online 2 May; see the Perspective by Hamm and Hess) sandwiched a single layer of the transition metal dichalcogenide WS2 between two sheets of graphene. The photocurrent response of the heterostructure device was enhanced, compared to that of the bare layer of WS2. The prospect of combining single or several-atom-thick layers into heterostructures should help to develop materials with a wide range of properties. Transition metal dichalcogenides sandwiched between two layers of graphene produce an enhanced photoresponse. [Also see Perspective by Hamm and Hess] The isolation of various two-dimensional (2D) materials, and the possibility to combine them in vertical stacks, has created a new paradigm in materials science: heterostructures based on 2D crystals. Such a concept has already proven fruitful for a number of electronic applications in the area of ultrathin and flexible devices. Here, we expand the range of such structures to photoactive ones by using semiconducting transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs)/graphene stacks. Van Hove singularities in the electronic density of states of TMDC guarantees enhanced light-matter interactions, leading to enhanced photon absorption and electron-hole creation (which are collected in transparent graphene electrodes). This allows development of extremely efficient flexible photovoltaic devices with photoresponsivity above 0.1 ampere per watt (corresponding to an external quantum efficiency of above 30%).

Subfields: Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2ae9074baf74d577050e01d96b8a6f90a7aea640

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Citations in the corpus

1-, 1.5-, and 2-μm Fiber Lasers Q-Switched by a Broadband Few-Layer MoS2 Saturable Absorber (2014, positive): “Determined by the unique symmetry of MoS2 lattice structure, the thickness-dependent band-gap and electronic band structure of MoS2 endow it with many new optical properties that are distinct from graphene and TIs [44], [45].”
2D materials and van der Waals heterostructures (2016, background): “Beyond graphene and hBN, lateral heterostructures based on 2D TMDCs can be disruptive for integrated optoelectronic devices.”
Atomically thin p-n junctions with van der Waals heterointerfaces. (2014, positive): “devices, such as photodiodes, photovoltaic cells, and light-emitting devices 3,8,14-19 .”
The effect of the substrate on the Raman and photoluminescence emission of single-layer MoS2 (2013, background): “and it constitutes an essential step towards the characterization of novel heterostructures based on h-BN, MoS2 and graphene which are recently attracting increasing attention[11, 18-20].”