No Arabic abstract
We have realized ambipolar ionic liquid gated field-effect transistors based on WS2 mono- and bilayers, and investigated their opto-electronic response. A thorough characterization of the transport properties demonstrates the high quality of these devices for both electron and hole accumulation, which enables the quantitative determination of the band gap ({Delta}1L = 2.14 eV for monolayers and {Delta}2L = 1.82 eV for bilayers). It also enables the operation of the transistors in the ambipolar injection regime with electrons and holes injected simultaneously at the two opposite contacts of the devices in which we observe light emission from the FET channel. A quantitative analysis of the spectral properties of the emitted light, together with a comparison with the band gap values obtained from transport, show the internal consistency of our results and allow a quantitative estimate of the excitonic binding energies to be made. Our results demonstrate the power of ionic liquid gating in combination with nanoelectronic systems, as well as the compatibility of this technique with optical measurements on semiconducting transition metal dichalcogenides. These findings further open the way to the investigation of the optical properties of these systems in a carrier density range much broader than that explored until now.
We realize and investigate ionic liquid gated field-effect transistors (FETs) on large-area MoS2 monolayers grown by chemical vapor deposition (CVD). Under electron accumulation, the performance of these devices is comparable to that of FETs based on exfoliated flakes. FETs on CVD-grown material, however, exhibit clear ambipolar transport, which for MoS2 monolayers had not been reported previously. We exploit this property to estimate the bandgap {Delta} of monolayer MoS2 directly from the device transfer curves and find {Delta} $approx$ 2.4-2.7 eV. In the ambipolar injection regime, we observe electroluminescence due to exciton recombination in MoS2, originating from the region close to the hole-injecting contact. Both the observed transport properties and the behavior of the electroluminescence can be consistently understood as due to the presence of defect states at an energy of 250-300 meV above the top of the valence band, acting as deep traps for holes. Our results are of technological relevance, as they show that devices with useful optoelectronic functionality can be realized on large-area MoS2 monolayers produced by controllable and scalable techniques.
Monolayers of molybdenum and tungsten dichalcogenides are direct bandgap semiconductors, which makes them promising for opto-electronic applications. In particular, van der Waals heterostructures consisting of monolayers of MoS2 sandwiched between atomically thin hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) and graphene electrodes allows one to obtain light emitting quantum wells (LEQWs) with low-temperature external quantum efficiency (EQE) of 1%. However, the EQE of MoS2 and MoSe2-based LEQWs shows behavior common for many other materials: it decreases fast from cryogenic conditions to room temperature, undermining their practical applications. Here we compare MoSe2 and WSe2 LEQWs. We show that the EQE of WSe2 devices grows with temperature, with room temperature EQE reaching 5%, which is 250x more than the previous best performance of MoS2 and MoSe2 quantum wells in ambient conditions. We attribute such a different temperature dependences to the inverted sign of spin-orbit splitting of conduction band states in tungsten and molybdenum dichalcogenides, which makes the lowest-energy exciton in WSe2 dark.
Coherence is a crucial requirement to realize quantum manipulation through light-matter interactions. Here we report the observation of anomalously robust valley polarization and valley coherence in bilayer WS2. The polarization of the photoluminescence from bilayer WS2 inherits that of the excitation source with both circularly and linearly polarized and retains even at room temperature. The near unity circular polarization of the luminescence reveals the coupling of spin, layer and valley degree of freedom in bilayer system, while the linear polarized photoluminescence manifests quantum coherence between the two inequivalent band extrema in momentum space, namely, the valley quantum coherence in atomically thin bilayer WS2. This observation opens new perspectives for quantum manipulation in atomically thin semiconductors.
We prepare twist-controlled resonant tunneling transistors consisting of monolayer (Gr) and Bernal bilayer (BGr) graphene electrodes separated by a thin layer of hexagonal boron nitride (hBN). The resonant conditions are achieved by closely aligning the crystallographic orientation of the graphene electrodes, which leads to momentum conservation for tunneling electrons at certain bias voltages. Under such conditions, negative differential conductance (NDC) can be achieved. Application of in-plane magnetic field leads to electrons acquiring additional momentum during the tunneling process, which allows control over the resonant conditions.
Superconductors at the atomic two-dimensional (2D) limit are the focus of an enduring fascination in the condensed matter community. This is because, with reduced dimensions, the effects of disorders, fluctuations, and correlations in superconductors become particularly prominent at the atomic 2D limit; thus such superconductors provide opportunities to tackle tough theoretical and experimental challenges. Here, based on the observation of ultrathin 2D superconductivity in mono- and bilayer molybdenum disulfide (MoS$_2$) with electric-double-layer (EDL) gating, we found that the critical sheet carrier density required to achieve superconductivity in a monolayer MoS$_2$ flake can be as low as 0.55*10$^{14}$cm$^{-2}$, which is much lower than those values in the bilayer and thicker cases in previous report and also our own observations. Further comparison of the phonon dispersion obtained by ab initio calculations indicated that the phonon softening of the acoustic modes around the M point plays a key role in the gate-induced superconductivity within the Bardeen-Cooper Schrieffer (BCS) theory framework. This result might help enrich the understanding of 2D superconductivity with EDL gating.