In nature, self-healing can be induced by sunlight for damage and wound repair, and this phenomenon is very important to living species for prolonging their lives. This self-repairing feature is obviously highly desirable for non-biological materials and manmade systems. In this paper, we demonstrate, for the first time, that battery electrodes can be self-repaired when exposed to sunlight. Here, we show that the optical, and photoelectrochemical (PEC) properties can be controlled by varying structural and compositional parameters of copper selenide nanocrystals (NCs). Cation to anion ratio in copper selenide (Cu2±xSe) NCs can be controlled over a wide range of 1.3–2.7 by simply changing the reaction temperature and impurity. Light-induced self-repairable behavior is demonstrated with electrochemical (EC) and PEC performances of electrodes made with stoichiometric copper selenide NCs. This nature-inspired, self-repairing behavior can be applied to batteries, supercapacitors, and photo-electrochemical fuel generators.
Nanostructure and nanoantenna-based all-optical (AO) devices have attracted significant research interests in recent years due to their small size, high information capacity, ultrafast processing, low power consumption, and overall practicality. Here, in this Letter, we propose a novel metasurface having quasi-rhombus-shaped antennas to modulate optical modes in a dielectric-loaded waveguide for the realization of a complete family of logic gates including NOT, AND, OR, XOR, NAND, NOR, and XNOR. These logic operations are realized using destructive and constructive interferences between the input optical signals. The high contrast ratios of about 33.39, 27.69, and 33.11 dB are achieved for the NAND, NOR, and XNOR logic gates, respectively, with the speed as high as 108 Gb/s.
Triple‐cation mixed metal halide perovskites are important optoelectronic materials due to their high photon to electron conversion efficiency, low exciton binding energy, and good thermal stability. However, the perovskites have low photon to electron conversion efficiency in near‐infrared (NIR) due to their weak intrinsic absorption at longer wavelength, especially near the band edge and over the bandgap wavelength. A plasmonic functionalized perovskite photodetector (PD) is designed and fabricated in this study, in which the perovskite ((Cs0.06FA0.79MA0.15)Pb(I0.85Br0.15)3) active materials are spin‐coated on the surface of Au bowtie nanoantenna (BNA) arrays substrate. Under 785 nm laser illumination, near the bandedge of perovskite, the fabricated BNA‐based plasmonic PD exhibits ≈2962% enhancement in the photoresponse over the Si/SiO2‐based normal PD. Moreover, the detectivity of the plasmonic PD has a value of 1.5 × 1012 with external quantum efficiency as high as 188.8%, more than 30 times over the normal PD. The strong boosting in the plasmonic PD performance is attributed to the enhanced electric field around BNA arrays through the coupling of localized surface plasmon resonance. The demonstrated BNA‐perovskite design can also be used to enhance performance of other optoelectronic devices, and the concept can be extended to other spectral regions with different active materials.
.Silicon waveguides are particularly appealing for the implementation of all-optical (AO) signal processing devices and switches due to the improved fabrication technology of silicon. Therefore, a silicon-on-silica waveguide is employed as the building block for simulating fundamental AO logic operations, including XOR, AND, OR, NOT, NOR, NAND, and XNOR, at 1.33-μm telecommunications wavelength. The proposed waveguide consists of two microring resonators and three strip waveguides. The operation concept of these logic gates relies on the constructive and destructive interference that results from the phase difference induced by incident optical beams. The performance of the target logic gates is assessed against the contrast ratio (CR) metric. The simulation results suggest that, by exploiting the proposed waveguides, these gates can operate with higher CR and faster speed compared to other designs.
Efficient and reliable mode converters with broadband operation and small footprint will enable high‐density silicon photonic integrated circuits to build high bitrate optical networks and handheld optical devices. Here, all‐dielectric nanoaperture metasurfaces in the silicon layer of a silicon‐on‐insulator platform are reported for mode‐order conversion with an ultrasmall footprint. Utilizing the advantages of an abrupt width change and metasurface, the mode conversion between TE00 and TE10 modes is realized with a conversion efficiency as high as ≈90% in simulations and 83.1% in experiments at λ = 1.55 µm within an ultrashort conversion length of about 2.42 µm, the shortest ever achieved. The incident TE00 mode is converted to TE10 mode with purity of more than 90% in a broadband (Δλ ≈ 230 nm) wavelength range from 1.42 to 1.65 µm. Moreover, optimizing the number, position, and dimension of nanoapertures, it is further demonstrated that the nanoaperture metasurface design can enable mode conversion between silicon waveguides of different thicknesses and different relative positions, and between TM modes.
Localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) of nanostructures and the interfacial charge transfer (CT) of semiconductor materials play essential roles in the study of optical and photoelectronic properties. In this paper, a composite substrate of Ag 2 S quantum dots (QDs) coated plasmonic Au bowtie nanoantenna (BNA) arrays with a metal–insulator–metal (MIM) configuration was built to study the synergistic effect of LSPR and interfacial CT using surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) in the near-infrared (NIR) region. The Au BNA array structure with a large enhancement of the localized electric field (E-field) strongly enhanced the Raman signal of adsorbed p-aminothiophenol (PATP) probe molecules. Meanwhile, the broad enhanced spectral region was achieved owing to the coupling of LSPR. The as-prepared Au BNA array structure facilitated enhancements of the excitation as well as the emission of Raman signal simultaneously, which was established by finite-difference time-domain simulation. Moreover, Ag 2 S semiconductor QDs were introduced into the BNA/PATP system to further enhance Raman signals, which benefited from the interfacial CT resonance in the BNA / Ag 2 S - QDs / PATP system. As a result, the Raman signals of PATP in the BNA / Ag 2 S - QDs / PATP system were strongly enhanced under 785 nm laser excitation due to the synergistic effect of E-field enhancement and interfacial CT. Furthermore, the SERS polarization dependence effects of the BNA / Ag 2 S - QDs / PATP system were also investigated. The SERS spectra indicated that the polarization dependence of the substrate increased with decreasing polarization angles ( θ pola ) of excitation from p-polarized ( θ pola = 90 ° ) excitation to s-polarized ( θ pola = 0 ° ) excitation. This study provides a strategy using the synergistic effect of interfacial CT and E-field enhancement for SERS applications and provides a guidance for the development of SERS study on semiconductor QD-based plasmonic substrates, and can be further extended to other material-nanostructure systems for various optoelectronic and sensing applications.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.