The creation of pseudo-magnetic fields in strained graphene has emerged as a promising route to investigate intriguing physical phenomena that would be unattainable with laboratory superconducting magnets. The giant pseudo-magnetic fields observed in highly deformed graphene can substantially alter the optical properties of graphene beyond a level that can be feasible with an external magnetic field, but the experimental signatures of the influence of such pseudo-magnetic fields have yet to be unveiled. Here, using time-resolved infrared pump-probe spectroscopy, we provide unambiguous evidence for slow carrier dynamics enabled by the pseudo-magnetic fields in periodically strained graphene. Strong pseudo-magnetic fields of ~100 T created by non-uniform strain in graphene on nanopillars are found to significantly decelerate the relaxation processes of hot carriers by more than an order of magnitude. Our findings offer alternative opportunities to harness the properties of graphene enabled by pseudo-magnetic fields for optoelectronics and condensed matter physics.
Despite its advantages of scalable process and cost-effectiveness, nanoimprinting faces challenges with imprinting hard materials (e.g., crystalline metals) at low/room temperatures, and with fabricating complex nanostructures rapidly (e.g., heterojunctions of metal and oxide). Herein, we report a room temperature ultrasonic nanoimprinting technique (named nanojackhammer) to address these challenges. Nanojackhammer capitalizes on the concentration of ultrasonic energy flow at nanoscale to shape bulk materials into nanostructures. Working at room temperature, nanojackhammer allows rapid fabrication of complex multi-compositional nanostructures made of virtually all solid materials regardless of their ductility, hardness, reactivity and melting points. Atomistic simulations reveal a unique alternating dislocation generation and recovery mechanism that significantly reduces the imprinting force under ultrasonic cyclic loading. As a proof-of-concept, a metal-oxide-metal plasmonic nanostructure with built-in nanogap is rapidly fabricated and employed for biosensing. As a fast, scalable, and cost-effective nanotechnology, nanojackhammer will enable various unique applications of complex nanostructures in optoelectronics, biosensing, catalysis and beyond.
Two-dimensional (2D) materials-based photodetectors in the infrared range hold the key to enabling a wide range of optoelectronics applications including infrared imaging and optical communications. While there exist 2D materials with a narrow bandgap sensitive to infrared photons, a two-photon absorption (TPA) process can also enable infrared photodetection in well-established 2D materials with large bandgaps such as WSe2 and MoS2. However, most of the TPA photodetectors suffer from low responsivity, preventing this method from being widely adopted for infrared photodetection. Herein, we experimentally demonstrate 2D materials-based TPA avalanche photodiodes achieving an ultrahigh responsivity. The WSe2/MoS2 heterostructure absorbs infrared photons with an energy smaller than the material bandgaps via a low-efficiency TPA process. The significant avalanche effect with a gain of ∼1300 improves the responsivity, resulting in the record-high responsivity of 88 μA/W. We believe that this work paves the way toward building practical and high-efficiency 2D materials-based infrared photodetectors.
Hot-electron-based solar energy conversion with metal-semiconductor nanodiodes Young Keun Lee, Hyosun Lee, Changhwan Lee et al. Advances in graphene-based optoelectronics, plasmonics and photonics Bich Ha Nguyen and Van Hieu Nguyen Photoresponse Enhancement in Graphene/Silicon Infrared Detector by Controlling Photocarrier Collection Xin Tang, Hengkai Zhang, Xiaobing Tang et al. Amplification of hot electron flow by the surface plasmon effect on metal-insulator-metal nanodiodes Changhwan Lee, Ievgen I Nedrygailov, Young Keun Lee et al. Light-matter interaction of 2D materials: Physics and device applicationsHot electrons excited by plasmon resonance in nanostructure can be employed to enhance the properties of photodetectors, even when the photon energy is lower than the bandgap of the semiconductor. However, current research has seldom considered how to realize the efficient collection of hot electrons, which restricts the responsivity of the device. In this paper, a type of plasmonic photodetector based on asymmetric nanogap electrodes is proposed. Owing to this structure, the device achieves responsivities as high as 0.45 and 0.25 mA/W for wavelengths of 1310 and 1550 nm, respectively. These insights can aid the realization of efficient plasmon-enhanced photodetectors for infrared detection.
Strained germanium nanowires have recently become an important material of choice for silicon-compatible optoelectronic devices. While the indirect bandgap nature of germanium had long been problematic both in light absorption and emission, recent successful demonstrations of bandstructure engineering by elastic strain have opened up the possibility of achieving direct bandgap in germanium, paving the way towards the realization of various high-performance optical devices integrated on a silicon platform. In particular, the latest demonstration of a low-threshold optically pumped laser in a highly strained germanium nanowire is expected to vitalize the field of silicon photonics further. Here, we review recent advances and challenges in strained germanium nanowires for optoelectronic applications such as photodetectors and lasers. We firstly introduce the theoretical foundation behind strained germanium nanowire optoelectronics. And several practical approaches that have been proposed to apply tensile strain in germanium nanowires are further discussed. Then we address the latest progress in the developments of strained germanium nanowire optoelectronic devices. Finally, we discuss the implications of these experimental achievements and the future outlook in this promising research field.
Despite the potential of graphene for building a variety of quantum photonic devices, its centrosymmetric nature forbids the observation of second harmonic generation (SHG) for developing second-order nonlinear devices. To activate SHG in graphene, extensive research efforts have been directed towards disrupting graphene’s inversion symmetry using external stimuli like electric fields. However, these methods fail to engineer graphene’s lattice symmetry, which is the root cause of the forbidden SHG. Here, we harness strain engineering to directly manipulate graphene’s lattice arrangement and induce sublattice polarization to activate SHG. Surprisingly, the SHG signal is boosted 50-fold at low temperatures, which can be explained by resonant transitions between strain-induced pseudo-Landau levels. The second-order susceptibility of strained graphene is found to be larger than that of hexagonal boron nitride with intrinsic broken inversion symmetry. Our demonstration of strong SHG in strained graphene offers promising possibilities for developing high-efficiency nonlinear devices for integrated quantum circuits.
The creation of CMOS compatible light sources is an important step for the realization of electronic-photonic integrated circuits. An efficient CMOS-compatible light source is considered the final missing component towards achieving this goal. In this work, we present a novel crossbeam structure with an embedded optical cavity that allows both a relatively high and fairly uniform biaxial strain of ∼0.9% in addition to a high-quality factor of >4,000 simultaneously. The induced biaxial strain in the crossbeam structure can be conveniently tuned by varying geometrical factors that can be defined by conventional lithography. Comprehensive photoluminescence measurements and analyses confirmed that optical gain can be significantly improved via the combined effect of low temperature and high strain, which is supported by a three-fold reduction of the full width at half maximum of a cavity resonance at ∼1,940 nm. Our demonstration opens up the possibility of further improving the performance of germanium lasers by harnessing geometrically amplified biaxial strain.
Graphene-based optoelectronic devices have recently attracted much attention for the next-generation electronic-photonic integrated circuits. However, it remains elusive whether it is feasible to create graphene-based lasers at the chip scale, hindering the realization of such a disruptive technology. In this work, we theoretically propose that Landau-quantized graphene enabled by strain-induced pseudomagnetic field can become an excellent gain medium that supports lasing action without requiring an external magnetic field. Tight-binding theory is employed for calculating electronic states in highly strained graphene while analytical and numerical analyses based on many-particle Hamiltonian allow studying detailed microscopic mechanisms of zero-field graphene Landau level laser dynamics. Our proposed laser presents unique features including a convenient, wide-range tuning of output laser frequency enabled by changing the level of strain in graphene gain media. The chip-scale graphene laser may open new possibilities for graphene-based electronic-photonic integrated circuits.
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