Making dark semiconductors shine

30-Jun-2022 - An international research team led by scientists at the University of Oldenburg has succeeded in manipulating the energy-level structure in an ultra-thin sample in such a way that this semiconductor, which normally has a low luminescence yield, began to emit light. Whether or not a solid can ...

Ultra-thin crystals as light sources in lasers

Laser emission demonstrated at room temperature: semiconductors consisting of three atomic layers could form the basis for innovative lasers

10-Nov-2021 - In an article published in the scientific journal Nature Communications, an international team led by Oldenburg physicists Dr. Hangyon Shan, Prof. Dr Christian Schneider and Dr. Carlos Anton-Solanas reports that crystals consisting of just three atomic layers can emit laser-like light at room ...

Electrons in a plaster

Researchers have tailored the mutual interaction of electrons in an atomically thin solid by simply covering it with a crystal featuring hand-picked lattice dynamics

24-Mar-2021 - In a cubic centimeter of a solid there are typically 10²³ electrons. In this massive many-body system, seemingly simple pairwise electron-electron interaction can cause extremely complex correlations and exotic behavior, such as superconductivity. This quantum phenomenon turns a solid into a ...

Solving the Mystery of Quantum Light in Thin Layers

17-Oct-2019 - A very special kind of light is emitted by tungsten diselenide layers. The reason for this has been unclear. Now an explanation has been found at TU Wien (Vienna). It is an exotic phenomenon that nobody was able to explain for years: when energy is supplied to a thin layer of the material ...

Substrate defects key to growth of 2D materials

14-May-2019 - Creating two-dimentional materials large enough to use in electronics is a challenge despite huge effort but now, Penn State researchers have discovered a method for improving the quality of one class of 2D materials, with potential to achieve wafer-scale growth in the future. The field of 2D ...

Long-distance relationships of particles: Electron-hole pairs in two-dimensional crystals

Researchers reveal the nature of optical excitations

07-May-2018 - When light of specific frequency hits a semiconductor crystal, it is absorbed and produces a excitation, a state of higher energy. In solar cells, this energy can be converted into electricity and used. In two-dimensional crystals, which consist of only a few atomic layers, so called “excitons” ...

The quantum waltz of electrons hints at the next generation of chips

06-Dec-2017 - A group of spintronics researchers at EPFL is using new materials to reveal more of the many capabilities of electrons. The field of spintronics seeks to tap the quantum properties of "spin," the term often used to describe one of the fundamental properties of elementary particles - in this case, ...

2017 WITec Paper Award for Outstanding Scientific Publications

29-Jun-2017 - From nearly 60 submissions for the 2017 WITec Paper Award, our jury selected the three best publications. They were written by scientists from Ireland, Portugal and Germany who used WITec correlative confocal Raman microscopes to study transition metal dichalcogenides, textile fibers and cement. ...

New way to control light with electric fields

29-May-2017 - "Our method is similar to the technique used to provide the computing capabilities of computers," says Linyou Cao, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at NC State and corresponding author of a paper on the work. "In computers, an electric field is used to turn electric ...

Major breakthrough in smart printed electronics

10-Apr-2017 - Researchers in AMBER, the Science Foundation Ireland-funded materials science research centre hosted in Trinity College Dublin, have fabricated printed transistors consisting entirely of 2-dimensional nanomaterials for the first time. These 2D materials combine exciting electronic properties with ...