Abstract
Semiconductor p–n junctions are the elementary building blocks of most electronic and optoelectronic devices. The need for their miniaturization has fuelled the rapid growth of interest in two-dimensional (2D) materials. However, the performance of a p–n junction considerably degrades as its thickness approaches a few nanometres and traditional technologies, such as doping and implantation, become invalid at the nanoscale. Here we report stable non-volatile programmable p–n junctions fabricated from the vertically stacked all-2D semiconductor/insulator/metal layers (WSe2/hexagonal boron nitride/graphene) in a semifloating gate field-effect transistor configuration. The junction exhibits a good rectifying behaviour with a rectification ratio of 104 and photovoltaic properties with a power conversion efficiency up to 4.1% under a 6.8 nW light. Based on the non-volatile programmable properties controlled by gate voltages, the 2D p–n junctions have been exploited for various electronic and optoelectronic applications, such as memories, photovoltaics, logic rectifiers and logic optoelectronic circuits.
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Acknowledgements
The work was supported by Natural Science Foundation of Shanghai (16ZR1439400, 17ZR1447700), National Natural Science Foundation of China (11104204, 21301032), the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2016YFA0203900), the Singapore National Research Foundation under NRF RF Award No. NRF-RF2013-08, the financial support from MOE under AcRF Tier 2 MOE2015-T2-2-007, was also partly supported through the BRI program, ‘Science and Emerging Technology of 2D Atomic Layered Materials and Devices’, funded by the United States Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) Grant No. BAA-AFOSR-2013-0001. The authors thank B. Li and X. Xu for the device fabrication and AFM characterization and N. Xuanyuan for the Kelvin probe force microscopy (KPFM) measurement.
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Z.Z. and D.L. conceived and designed the project. D.L. performed the device fabrication and properties characterization. M.C. carried out the AFM and Raman measurements. P.Y. contributed the WSe1.2Te0.8 crystals. Z.Z., Z.L. and P.M.A. supervised the experiment. Z.Z., D.L., Z.S., Z.L. and P.M.A. co-wrote the paper. All the authors discussed the results and commented on the manuscript.
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Li, D., Chen, M., Sun, Z. et al. Two-dimensional non-volatile programmable p–n junctions. Nature Nanotech 12, 901–906 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2017.104
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2017.104
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