No abstract

Room‐temperature‐operating highly sensitive mid‐wavelength infrared (MWIR) photodetectors are utilized in a large number of important applications, including night vision, communications, and optical radar. Many previous studies have demonstrated uncooled MWIR photodetectors using 2D narrow‐bandgap semiconductors. To date, most of these works have utilized atomically thin flakes, simple van der Waals (vdW) heterostructures, or atomically thin p–n junctions as absorbers, which have difficulty in meeting the requirements for state‐of‐the‐art MWIR photodetectors with a blackbody response. Here, a fully depleted self‐aligned MoS2‐BP‐MoS2 vdW heterostructure sandwiched between two electrodes is reported. This new type of photodetector exhibits competitive performance, including a high blackbody peak photoresponsivity up to 0.77 A W−1 and low noise‐equivalent power of 2.0 × 10−14 W Hz−1/2, in the MWIR region. A peak specific detectivity of 8.61 × 1010 cm Hz1/2 W−1 under blackbody radiation is achieved at room temperature in the MWIR region. Importantly, the effective detection range of the device is twice that of state‐of‐the‐art MWIR photodetectors. Furthermore, the device presents an ultrafast response of ≈4 µs both in the visible and short‐wavelength infrared bands. These results provide an ideal platform for realizing broadband and highly sensitive room‐temperature MWIR photodetectors.

High pressure has been demonstrated to be a powerful approach of producing novel condensed-matter states, particularly in tuning the superconducting transition temperature (T c) of the superconductivity in a clean fashion without involving the complexity of chemical doping. However, the challenge of high-pressure experiment hinders further in-depth research for underlying mechanisms. Here, we have successfully synthesized continuous layer-controllable SnSe2 films on SrTiO3 substrate using molecular beam epitaxy. By means of scanning tunneling microscopy/spectroscopy (STM/S) and Raman spectroscopy, we found that the strong compressive strain is intrinsically built in few-layers films, with a largest equivalent pressure up to 23 GPa in the monolayer. Upon this, unusual 2 × 2 charge ordering is induced at the occupied states in the monolayer, accompanied by prominent decrease in the density of states (DOS) near the Fermi energy (E F), resembling the gap states of CDW reported in transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) materials. Subsequently, the coexistence of charge ordering and the interfacial superconductivity is observed in bilayer films as a result of releasing the compressive strain. In conjunction with spatially resolved spectroscopic study and first-principles calculation, we find that the enhanced interfacial superconductivity with an estimated T c of 8.3 K is observed only in the 1 × 1 region. Such superconductivity can be ascribed to a combined effect of interfacial charge transfer and compressive strain, which leads to a considerable downshift of the conduction band minimum and an increase in the DOS at E F. Our results provide an attractive platform for further in-depth investigation of compression-induced charge ordering (monolayer) and the interplay between charge ordering and superconductivity (bilayer). Meanwhile, it has opened up a pathway to prepare strongly compressed two-dimensional materials by growing onto a SrTiO3 substrate, which is promising to induce superconductivity with a higher T c.

Metal phosphorous tri-chalcogenides are a category of new ternary 2D layered materials with a wide range of tuneable bandgaps (1.2-3.5 eV). These wide-bandgap semiconductors exhibit great potential applications in solar-blind ultraviolet (SBUV) photodetection. However, these 2D solarblind photodetectors suffer from low photoresponsivity, slow photoresponse speed, and narrow operation spectral region, thereby limiting their practical applications. Here, an ultra-broadband photodetection based on a FePSe 3 / MoS 2 heterostructure with coverage ranging from solar-blind ultraviolet 265 nm to longwave infrared (LWIR) 10.6 µm is reported. Notably, the device exhibits excellent weak light detection capability. A high photoresponsivity of 33 600 A W −1 and an external quantum efficiency of 1.57 × 10 7 % are demonstrated. A noise-equivalent power as low as 5.7 × 10 -16 W Hz −1/2 and a specific detectivity up to 1.51 × 10 13 cm Hz 1/2 W −1 are realized in the SBUV region. The room temperature LWIR photoresponsivity of 0.12 A W −1 is realized. This work opens a route to design high-performance SBUV photo detectors and wide spectral photoresponse applications.

Materials can exhibit exotic properties when they approach the two-dimensional (2D) limit. Because of promising applications in catalysis and energy storage, 2D transition-metal carbides (TMCs) have attracted considerable attention in recent years. Among these TMCs, ultrathin crystalline α-Mo 2 C flakes have been fabricated by chemical vapor deposition on Cu/Mo bilayer foils, and their 2D superconducting property was revealed by transport measurements. Herein, we studied the ultrathin α-Mo 2 C flakes by atomic-resolved scanning tunneling microscopy/spectroscopy (STM/S). Strain-related structural modulation and the coexistence of different layer-stacking modes are observed on the Mo-terminated surface of α-Mo 2 C flakes as well as various lattice defects. Furthermore, an enhanced superconductivity with shorter correlation length was observed by STS technique, and such superconductivity is very robust despite the appearance of the defects. A mechanism of superconducting enhancement is proposed based on the strain-induced strong coupling and the increased disordering originated from lattice defects. Our results provide a comprehensive understanding of the correlations between atomic structure, defects, and enhanced superconductivity of this emerging 2D material.

Substitutional doping provides an effective strategy to tailor the properties of 2D materials, but it remains an open challenge to achieve tunable uniform doping, especially at high doping level. Here, uniform lattice substitution of a 2D Mo2C superconductor by magnetic Cr atoms with controlled concentration up to ≈46.9 at% by chemical vapor deposition and a specifically designed Cu/Cr/Mo trilayer growth substrate is reported. The concentration of Cr atoms can be easily tuned by simply changing the thickness of the Cr layer, and the samples retain the original structure of 2D Mo2C even at a very high Cr concentration. The controlled uniform Cr doping enables the tuning of the competition of the 2D superconductor and the Kondo effect across the whole sample. Transport measurements show that with increasing Cr concentration, the superconductivity of the 2D Cr‐doped Mo2C crystals disappears along with the emergence of the Kondo effect, and the Kondo temperature increases monotonously. Using scanning tunneling microscopy/spectroscopy, the mechanism of the doping level effect on the interplay and evolution between superconductivity and the Kondo effect is revealed. This work paves a new way for the synthesis of 2D materials with widely tunable doping levels, and provides new understandings on the interplay between superconductivity and magnetism in the 2D limit.

We use neutron scattering to study the electron-doped superconducting NaFe0.985Co0.015As (Tc = 14 K), which has co-existing static antiferromagnetic (AF) order (TN = 31 K) and exhibits two neutron spin resonances (Er1 ≈ 3.5 meV and Er2 ≈ 6 meV) at the in-plane AF ordering wave vector Q AF = Q1 = (1, 0) in reciprocal space. In the twinned state below the tetragonal-to-orthorhombic structural transition Ts, both resonance modes appear at Q1 but cannot be distinguished from Q2 = (0, 1). By detwinning the single crystal with uniaxial pressure along the orthorhombic b-axis, we find that both resonances appear only at Q1 with vanishing intensity at Q2. Since electronic bands of the orbital dxz and dyz characters split below Ts with the dxz band sinking ∼ 10 meV below the Fermi surface, our results indicate that the neutron spin resonances in NaFe0.985Co0.015As arise mostly from quasi-particle excitations between the hole and electron Fermi surfaces with the dyz orbital character.

Unconventional quasiparticle excitations in condensed matter systems have become one of the most important research frontiers. Beyond twofold and fourfold degenerate Weyl and Dirac fermions, threefold, sixfold, and eightfold symmetry protected degeneracies have been predicted. However they remain challenging to realize in solid state materials. Here the charge density wave compound TaTe 4 is proposed to hold eightfold fermionic excitation and Dirac point in energy bands. High quality TaTe 4 single crystals are prepared, where the charge density wave is revealed by directly imaging the atomic structure and a pseudogap of about 45 meV on the surface. Shubnikov-de Haas oscillations of TaTe 4 are consistent with band structure calculation. Scanning tunneling microscopy/spectroscopy reveals atomic step edge states on the surface of TaTe 4 . This work uncovers that the charge density wave is able to induce new topological phases and sheds new light on the novel excitations in condensed matter materials.