A team of physicists from the University of California, San Diego and The University of Manchester is creating tailor-made materials for cutting-edge research and perhaps a new generation of optoelectronic devices. The materials make it easier for the researchers to manipulate excitons, which are pairs of an electron and an electron hole bound to each other by an electrostatic force.
Excitons are created when a laser is shone onto a semiconductor device.
Ref: Control of excitons in multi-layer van der Waals heterostructures. Applied Physics Letters (7 March 2016) | DOI: 10.1063/1.4943204 | PDF (Open Access)
ABSTRACT
We report an experimental study of excitons in a double quantum well van der Waals heterostructure made of atomically thin layers of MoS2 and hexagonal boron nitride. The emission of neutral and charged excitons is controlled by gate voltage, temperature, and both the helicity and the power of optical excitation.