Solar-energy conversion and light emission in an atomic monolayer p-n diode.

By A. Pospischil, Marco M. Furchi, Thomas Mueller. Nature Nanotechnology, 2013

1,324 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The limitations of the bulk semiconductors currently used in electronic devices-rigidity, heavy weight and high costs--have recently shifted the research efforts to two-dimensional atomic crystals such as graphene and atomically thin transition-metal dichalcogenides. These materials have the potential to be produced at low cost and in large areas, while maintaining high material quality. These properties, as well as their flexibility, make two-dimensional atomic crystals attractive for applications such as solar cells or display panels. The basic building blocks of optoelectronic devices are p-n junction diodes, but they have not yet been demonstrated in a two-dimensional material. Here, we report a p-n junction diode based on an electrostatically doped tungsten diselenide (WSe2) monolayer. We present applications as a photovoltaic solar cell, a photodiode and a light-emitting diode, and obtain light-power conversion and electroluminescence efficiencies of ∼ 0.5% and ∼ 0.1%, respectively. Given recent advances in the large-scale production of two-dimensional crystals, we expect them to profoundly impact future developments in solar, lighting and display technologies.

Subfields: Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8f568c342cfd866da94e27a1a68a757b7a4abd51

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In Materials Chemistry

1. W. Yao
2. Mark C. Hersam
3. Xiaodong Xu
4. Hongyi Yu
5. E. Malic
6. Thomas Mueller
7. Di Xiao
8. Dmitri Golberg

Citations in the corpus

• Emerging device applications for semiconducting two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenides. (2014, background): “5%.(207) Recently, vertically stacked graphene/TMDC/graphene structures have also shown promise with external quantum efficiency values as high as 55% at a single wavelength.”
• Control of two-dimensional excitonic light emission via photonic crystal (2013, background): “Based on these properties, single layer MoS2 transistors [12], ultrahigh-gain phototransistors [13], ultrasensitive photodetectors [14] and light-emitting diodes (LEDs) [15–18] have already been demonstrated.”
• Exciton physics and device application of two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenide semiconductors (2018, methodology): “More recently, lateral p-n junctions, realized by split-gate electrodes [36, 37, 128], and lateral metal/TMD Schottky junctions [129] have been investigated.”