Coulomb engineering of the bandgap and excitons in two-dimensional materials.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 28469178.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/ncomms15251 and PMC identifier 5418602.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
The ability to control the size of the electronic bandgap is an integral part of solid-state technology. Atomically thin two-dimensional crystals offer a new approach for tuning the energies of the electronic states based on the unusual strength of the Coulomb interaction in these materials and its environmental sensitivity. Here, we show that by engineering the surrounding dielectric environment, one can tune the electronic bandgap and the exciton binding energy in monolayers of WS2 and WSe2 by hundreds of meV. We exploit this behaviour to present an in-plane dielectric heterostructure with a spatially dependent bandgap, as an initial step towards the creation of diverse lateral junctions with nanoscale resolution.