The research is led by graduate physics student Jie Gu and post-doctoral fellow Biswanath Chakraborty, in collaboration with another graduate student, Mandeep Khatoniyar. According to Vinod Menon, chair of physics in City College’s Division of Science and the research team’s mentor, their double feat, reported in the journal “Nature Nanotechnology,” marks an important milestone in the field of 2D materials and, more broadly, LEDs. While such LEDs have been realized in other materials at low temperatures, this device operates at room temperature and is fabricated using the now well known “scotch tape” based technique. “The fact that this device is fabricated using stacks of atomically thin materials and operates at room temperature makes it an important first step towards a technologically relevant device demonstration,” noted Menon, adding: “One potential application of such hybrid LEDs is the speed of operation – which can translate to using them for LED-based communication systems including LiFi.” LiFi is a wireless optical networking technology that uses LEDs for data transmission. The benefits of LiFi include higher speeds than Wi-Fi. The device was fabricated at the CCNY-based CUNY Advanced Science Research Center’s nanofabrication facility and tested in Menon’s lab. In follow-up research, the CCNY team is attempting to realize quantum emitters (single photon emitters) using similar architecture.
The work is funded by the National Science Foundation and the Army Research Office. Reference: “A room-temperature polariton light-emitting diode based on monolayer WS2” by Jie Gu, Biswanath Chakraborty, Mandeep Khatoniar and Vinod M. Menon, 23 September 2019, Nature Nanotechnology.DOI: 10.1038/s41565-019-0543-6
