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Heterogeneous materials with spatially modulated bandgaps have many unique applications, such as super-broadband nanolasers, color engineered displays, hyperspectral detectors, and full spectrum solar cells. In this work, spatially composition-graded WSe2 − 2xTe2x flakes are synthesized through an in situ chemical vapor deposition method. Furthermore, a monolayer flake topography is confirmed by atomic force microscopy. Photoluminescence and Raman line-scanning characterization indicate the bandgap changes continuously from center (1.46 eV) to edge (∼1.61 eV) within a monolayer flake. Electronic devices based on this spatially composition-graded material exhibit tunable transfer curves. First principal calculation reveals that the electron affinity increases, while the bandgap decreases based on tellurium composition. This is consistent with experimentally observed non-monotonic dependence of the hole current on tellurium composition. This work provides the experimental groundwork for synthesis of the composition-graded transition metal dichalcogenide materials and offers a route toward tailoring their electrical properties by bandgap engineering in the future.

Moire superlattices-twisted van der Waals (vdW) structures with small angles-are attracting increasing attention in condensed matter physics, due to important phenomena revealed therein, including unconventional superconductivity, correlated insulating states, and ferromagnetism. Moire superlattices are typically comprised of atomic layers of vdW materials where the exotic physics arises from the quantum electronic coupling between adjacent atomic layers. Recently, moire electronics has motivated their photonic counterparts. In addition to vdW materials, twisted photonic systems can also be comprised of metamaterials, metasurfaces, and photonic crystals, mediated by interlayer electromagnetic coupling instead. The interplay between short-ranged interlayer quantum and long-ranged electromagnetic coupling in twisted structures are expected to yield rich phenomena in nano-optics. This perspective reviews recent progress in twisted structures for nanophotonics and outlooks emerging topics, opportunities, fundamental challenges, and potential applications., Comment: 23 pages, 5 figures The following article has been accepted by Applied Physics Letters. After it is published, it will be found at https://aip.scitation.org/journal/apl

Electron mobility in strained silicon and various surface oriented germanium ultrathin-body (UTB) metal-oxide semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs) with sub-10-nm-body thickness are systematically studied. For biaxial tensile strained-Si UTB MOSFETs, strain effects offer mobility enhancement down to a body thickness of 3nm, below which strong quantum confinement effect renders further valley splitting via application of strain redundant. For Ge channel UTB MOSFETs, electron mobility is found to be highly dependent on surface orientation. Ge⟨100⟩ and Ge⟨110⟩ surfaces have low quantization mass that leads to a lower mobility than that of Si in aggressively scaled UTB MOSFETs.

We systematically investigate the spatial/temporal photocurrent in photodetectors and electronic transport in transistors/Hall-bar devices based on monolayer MoS2 grown by chemical vapor deposition (CVD). We found that the maximum photocurrent occurs when the laser spot is close to the metal/MoS2 contact and is tunable by the applied drain voltage, which can be explained by the modulation of the local electric field at the Schottky barrier, consistent with predictions from our quantum transport simulation. We observed that the maximum photocurrent at drain contact is much larger than the one at the source contact, and the DC currents show rectifying behavior. These phenomena can be explained by the different Schottky barrier heights at the two contacts. By measuring Hall-bar structure at various temperatures from 100 K to 400 K, we extracted the barrier heights at the source and drain contacts, separately. We found that the barrier height at drain contact is about 50 mV larger than the one at the source c...