OPTOvanderWAALS · Optoelectronics with Complex van der Waals Heterostructures
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2018-04-01 → 2020-03-31
- EU contribution
- €166,157
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-ST
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Optoelectronics with Complex van der Waals Heterostructures
Research on two-dimensional materials has spread to a far-reaching range of fields in the last decade. Due to their interesting and large variety of properties, two-dimensional materials are nowadays investigated as potential candidates in a broad assortment of applications. Among these different research fields, optoelectronics is one the most relevant ones, with numerous proof-of-concept and working devices realized and developed during the past few years. Spanning from photodetectors, solar cells to light emitters, two-dimensional materials seem to be good complementary, or even imponent competitors, to the current semiconductor technology. However, research is still needed to catch up with conventional semiconductors. From fundamental physics to applications, the research community dedicates nowadays high efforts to the understanding of the optical and optoelectronic properties of these materials. The project OPTOvanderWAALS deals with the fabrication and study of complex van der Waals heterostructures to study inter- and intra-layer excitonic phenomena and use these excitonic effects to fabricate optoelectronic devices. Sustained on three main objectives, OPTOvanderWAALS has been dedicated to the fabrication of high-quality van der Waals heterostructures (Objective I) to study different excitonic states in two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), employing them in tunable light emitters. Furthermore, these heterostructures and knowledge on exciton Physics is employed to develop novel photodetection (Objective II) and energy harvesting, or photovoltaic (Objective III), devices.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Two-dimensional (2D) materials have attracted the attention of the scientific community since the discovery of graphene in 2004 (an atomically thin layer of graphite), due to the new and interesting physical phenomena found in this material. Graphene was not just a scientific breakthrough from a physical point of view, but it also opened the door to research on atomically thin materials. Nowadays, many materials with a wide range of properties (metals, semiconductors, insulators, superconductors…) have been achieved in a 2D configuration, and still there are more to come.The proposed project OPTOvanderWAALS aims to the fabrication and study of complex van der Waals heterostructures to study inter-layer excitonic phenomena and use these excitonic effects to fabricate ultra-high-performance optoelectronic devices. Novel intermediate layers between 2D semiconductors will be employed to automatically switch on and off photodetectors with an extraordinarily low dark current, which will be translated in an ultra-high-performance. These intermediate layers will be also used in photovoltaic cells as recombination region, allowing the recombination of unbalanced electron-hole pairs and avoiding charge build-up in the cells, resulting in an increased open-circuit voltage and, therefore, higher efficiency than state-of-the-art 2D photovoltaic cells. Besides, all of these heterostructures will be fabricated following a new procedure to align the crystal structure of different layers by second harmonic generation imaging, resulting in an optimized interaction between layers that will ultimately lead to ultra-high-performance devices in a new generation of flexible and transparent optoelectronics.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- TECHNISCHE UNIVERSITAET WIEN · WienCoordinatorAustria
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union