No Arabic abstract
We fabricated ferroelectric Bi4Ti3O12 (BiT) single crystalline thin films site-specifically substituted with LaTMO3 (TM = Al, Ti, V, Cr, Mn, Co, and Ni) on SrTiO3 substrates by pulsed laser epitaxy. When transition metals are incorporated into a certain site of the BiT, some of BiT-LaTMO3 showed a substantially decreased band gap, coming from the additional optical transition between oxygen 2p and TM 3d states. Specifically, all alloys with Mott insulators revealed a possibility of band gap reduction. Among them, BiT-LaCoO3 showed the largest band gap reduction by ~1 eV, positioning itself as a promising material for highly efficient opto-electronic devices.
Fabricating complex transition metal oxides with a tuneable band gap without compromising their intriguing physical properties is a longstanding challenge. Here we examine the layered ferroelectric bismuth titanate and demonstrate that, by site-specific substitution with the Mott insulator lanthanum cobaltite, its band gap can be narrowed as much as one electron volt, while remaining strongly ferroelectric. We find that when a specific site in the host material is preferentially substituted, a split-off state responsible for the band gap reduction is created just below the conduction band of bismuth titanate. This provides a route for controlling the band gap in complex oxides for use in emerging oxide opto-electronic and energy applications.
Graphene has shown great application potentials as the host material for next generation electronic devices. However, despite its intriguing properties, one of the biggest hurdles for graphene to be useful as an electronic material is its lacking of an energy gap in the electronic spectra. This, for example, prevents the use of graphene in making transistors. Although several proposals have been made to open a gap in graphenes electronic spectra, they all require complex engineering of the graphene layer. Here we show that when graphene is epitaxially grown on the SiC substrate, a gap of ~ 0.26 is produced. This gap decreases as the sample thickness increases and eventually approaches zero when the number of layers exceeds four. We propose that the origin of this gap is the breaking of sublattice symmetry owing to the graphene-substrate interaction. We believe our results highlight a promising direction for band gap engineering of graphene.
Optoelectronic excitations in monolayer MoS2 manifest from a hierarchy of electrically tunable, Coulombic free-carrier and excitonic many-body phenomena. Investigating the fundamental interactions underpinning these phenomena - critical to both many-body physics exploration and device applications - presents challenges, however, due to a complex balance of competing optoelectronic effects and interdependent properties. Here, optical detection of bound- and free-carrier photoexcitations is used to directly quantify carrier-induced changes of the quasiparticle band gap and exciton binding energies. The results explicitly disentangle the competing effects and highlight longstanding theoretical predictions of large carrier-induced band gap and exciton renormalization in 2D semiconductors.
An oxide heterostructure made of manganite bilayers and ferroelectric perovskites is predicted to lead to the full control of magnetism when switching the ferroelectric polarizations. By using asymmetric polar interfaces in the superlattices, more electrons occupy the Mn layer at the $n$-type interface side than at the $p$-type side. This charge disproportionation can be enhanced or suppressed by the ferroelectric polarization. Quantum model and density functional theory calculations reach the same conclusion: a ferromagnetic-ferrimagnetic phase transition with maximal change $>90%$ of the total magnetization can be achieved by switching the polarizations direction. This function is robust and provides full control of the magnetizations magnitude, not only its direction, via electrical methods.
XXYZ equiatomic quaternary Heusler alloys (EQHAs) containing Cr, Al, and select Group IVB elements ($textit{M}$ = Ti, Zr, Hf) and Group VB elements ($textit{N}$ = V, Nb, Ta) were studied using state-of-the-art density functional theory to determine their effectiveness in spintronic applications. Each alloy is classified based on their spin-dependent electronic structure as a half-metal, a spin gapless semiconductor, or a spin filter material. We predict several new fully-compensated ferrimagnetic spin filter materials with small electronic gaps and large exchange splitting allowing for robust spin polarization with small resistance. CrVZrAl, CrVHfAl, CrTiNbAl, and CrTiTaAl are identified as particularly robust spin filter candidates with an exchange splitting of $sim 0.20$ eV. In particular, CrTiNbAl and CrTiTaAl have exceptionally small band gaps of $sim 0.10$ eV. Moreover, in these compounds, a spin asymmetric electronic band gap is maintained in 2 of 3 possible atomic arrangements they can take, making the electronic properties less susceptible to random site disorder. In addition, hydrostatic stress is applied to a subset of the studied compounds in order to determine the stability and tunability of the various electronic phases. Specifically, we find the CrAlV$textit{M}$ subfamily of compounds to be exceptionally sensitive to hydrostatic stress, yielding transitions between all spin-dependent electronic phases.