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A room-temperature polariton light-emitting diode based on monolayer WS2

Nature Nanotechnology volume 14, pages 1024–1028 (2019)Cite this article

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Abstract

Exciton polaritons that arise through the strong coupling of excitons and cavity photons are used to demonstrate a wide array of fundamental phenomena and potential applications that range from Bose–Einstein-like condensation1,2,3 to analogue Hamiltonian simulators4,5 and chip-scale interferometers6. Recently, the two-dimensional (2D) transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), because of their large exciton binding energies, oscillator strength and valley degree of freedom, have emerged as a very attractive platform to realize exciton polaritons at elevated temperatures7. Achieving the electrical injection of polaritons is attractive both as a precursor to realizing electrically driven polariton lasers as well as for high speed light-emitting diodes (LEDs) for communication systems. Here, we demonstrate an electrically driven polariton LED that operates at room temperature using monolayer tungsten disulfide (WS2) as the emissive material. The extracted external quantum efficiency is ~0.1% and is comparable to recent demonstrations of bulk organic8 and carbon nanotube-based polariton electroluminescence (EL) devices9. The possibility to realize electrically driven polariton LEDs in atomically thin semiconductors at room temperature presents a promising step towards achieving an inversionless electrically driven laser in these systems as well as for ultrafast microcavity LEDs using van der Waals (vdW) materials.

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Fig. 1: Device schematic and tunnelling mechanism.
Fig. 2: Polariton dispersion.
Fig. 3: Current-dependent polariton EL intensity.
Fig. 4: Negatively detuned polariton LED.

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Data are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge support from the National Science Foundation through the Emerging Frontiers Research and Innovation-2DARE program (EFMA-1542863), the Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers program 420634 and the Army Research Office Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative program (W911NF-17-1-0312). The authors also acknowledge the use of the Nanofabrication Facility at the City University of New York Advanced Science Research Center for the fabrication of the devices.

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  1. These authors contributed equally: Jie Gu, Biswanath Chakraborty.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, City College of New York, City University of New York, New York, USA

    Jie Gu, Biswanath Chakraborty, Mandeep Khatoniar & Vinod M. Menon

  2. Department of Physics, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, USA

    Jie Gu, Mandeep Khatoniar & Vinod M. Menon

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  1. Jie Gu
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  2. Biswanath Chakraborty
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Contributions

V.M.M., J.G. and B.C. conceived the experiments. J.G., B.C. and M.K. fabricated the devices and performed the measurements. B.C., J.G. and V.M.M. performed data analysis. All the authors contributed to write the manuscript and discuss the results.

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Correspondence to Vinod M. Menon.

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Gu, J., Chakraborty, B., Khatoniar, M. et al. A room-temperature polariton light-emitting diode based on monolayer WS2. Nat. Nanotechnol. 14, 1024–1028 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-019-0543-6

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