No Arabic abstract
The large tunability of band gaps and optical absorptions of armchair MoS$_2$ nanoribbons of different widths under bending is studied using density functional theory and many-body perturbation GW and Bethe-Salpeter equation approaches. We find that there are two critical bending curvatures, and the non-edge and edge band gaps generally show a non-monotonic trend with bending. The non-degenerate edge gap splits show an oscillating feature with ribbon width n, with a period delta_n=3, due to quantum confinement effects. The complex strain patterns on the bent nanoribbons control the varying features of band structures and band gaps that result in varying exciton formations and optical properties. The binding energy and the spin singlet-triplet split of the exciton forming the lowest absorption peak generally decrease with bending curvatures. The large tunability of optical properties of bent MoS$_2$ nanoribbons is promising and will find applications in tunable optoelectronic nanodevices.
We report the infrared transmission measurement on electrically gated twisted bilayer graphene. The optical absorption spectrum clearly manifests the dramatic changes such as the splitting of inter-linear-band absorption step, the shift of inter-van Hove singularity transition peak, and the emergence of very strong intra-valence (intra-conduction) band transition. These anomalous optical behaviors demonstrate consistently the non-rigid band structure modification created by the ion-gel gating through the layer-dependent Coulomb screening. We propose that this screening-driven band modification is an universal phenomenon that persists to other bilayer crystals in general, establishing the electrical gating as a versatile technique to engineer the band structures and to create new types of optical absorptions that can be exploited in electro-optical device application.
In the emerging world of twisted bilayer structures, the possible configurations are limitless, which enables for a rich landscape of electronic properties. In this paper, we focus on twisted bilayer transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) and study its properties by means of an accurate tight-binding model. We build structures with different angles and find that the so-called flatbands emerge when the twist angle is sufficiently small (around 7.3$^{circ}$). Interestingly, the band gap can be tuned up to a 2.2% (51 meV) when the twist angle in the relaxed sample varies from 21.8$^{circ}$ to 0.8$^{circ}$. Furthermore, when looking at local density of states we find that the band gap varies locally along the moir`e pattern due to the change in the coupling between layers at different sites. Finally, we also find that the system can suffer a transition from a semiconductor to a metal when a sufficiently strong electric field is applied. Our study can serve as a guide for the practical engineering of the TMDCs based optoelectronic devices.
Non-volatile memory devices have been limited to flash architectures that are complex devices. Here, we present a unique photomemory effect in MoS$_2$ transistors. The photomemory is based on a photodoping effect - a controlled way of manipulating the density of free charges in monolayer MoS$_2$ using a combination of laser exposure and gate voltage application. The photodoping promotes changes on the conductance of MoS$_2$ leading to photomemory states with high memory on/off ratio. Such memory states are non-volatile with an expectation of retaining up to 50 % of the information for tens of years. Furthermore, we show that the photodoping is gate-tunable, enabling control of the recorded memory states. Finally, we propose a model to explain the photodoping, and we provide experimental evidence supporting such a phenomenon. In summary, our work includes the MoS$_2$ phototransistors in the non-volatile memory devices and expands the possibilities of memory application beyond conventional memory architectures.
We discuss here the effect of band nesting and topology on the spectrum of excitons in a single layer of MoS$_2$, a prototype transition metal dichalcogenide material. We solve for the single particle states using the ab initio based tight-binding model containing metal $d$ and sulfur $p$ orbitals. The metal orbitals contribution evolving from $K$ to $Gamma$ points results in conduction-valence band nesting and a set of second minima at $Q$ points in the conduction band. There are three $Q$ minima for each $K$ valley. We accurately solve the Bethe-Salpeter equation including both $K$ and $Q$ points and obtain ground and excited exciton states. We determine the effects of the electron-hole single particle energies including band nesting, direct and exchange screened Coulomb electron-hole interactions and resulting topological magnetic moments on the exciton spectrum. The ability to control different contributions combined with accurate calculations of the ground and excited exciton states allows for the determination of the importance of different contributions and a comparison with effective mass and $kcdot p$ massive Dirac fermion models.
In-plane optical anisotropy has been detected from monolayer MoS$_2$ grown on a-plane (11-20) sapphire substrate in the ultraviolet-visible wavelength range. Based on the measured optical anisotropy, the energy differences between the optical transitions polarized along the ordinary and extraordinary directions of the underlying sapphire substrate have been determined. The results corroborate comprehensively with the dielectric environment induced modification on the electronic band structure and exciton binding energy of monolayer MoS$_2$ predicted recently by first principle calculations. The output of this study proposes the symmetry as a new degree of freedom for dielectric engineering of the two-dimensional materials.