Two layers of semiconductors squeezed by a massive electric field have revealed a state of matter that was invisible until now.
A new molecular gating technique allowed researchers to apply electric fields twice as strong as any previous experiment. This extreme pressure forced electrons and holes to pair up across the layers in a configuration never seen before. These interlayer excitons are incredibly stable and can be controlled with high precision. This discovery provides a new building block for light-based computers that are much faster than current silicon chips. It shows that the limits of material science are further away than we imagined.
New interlayer excitons in 2D bilayers revealed under strong electric field
research_square · rs-3453831
Abstract Excitons in bilayer transition metal dichalcogenides (2L-TMDs) are Coulomb-bound electron/hole pairs that can be viewed as broadly tunable analogs of atomic or molecular systems. Here, we study the properties of 2L-TMD excitons under a strong electric field. To overcome the field limit reached in previous experiments, we developed a new organic/inorganic molecular gating technique. This approach allows us to achieve an electric field strengh of about 0.35 V nm-1, more than a factor of t