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CONDENSED-MATTER PHYSICS

Excitons surf the waves

Nature Photonics volume 16, pages 179–180 (2022)Cite this article

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Directional control of the diffusion of excitons is desired for excitonic devices, but being neutrally charged they can’t be transported by applying a bias voltage as for conventional electronic transport. It is now shown that surface acoustic waves can direct the flux of excitons over micrometre distances, even at room temperature.

Conventional electronic devices rely on the transport of electron charge carriers to transmit information. However, the growing need for energy-efficient devices has recently led to the exploration of alternative approaches for developing logic devices where information is encoded in different particles (such as photons and magnons) or quantum numbers (for example spintronics and valleytronics). In recent years, excitons — bound states between an electron and a hole — have progressively gained relevance in the scientific community, owing to their great potential for interfacing light-based and electron-based devices to create exciton-based electronics1,2. Moreover, owing to their bosonic nature, excitons are appealing candidates for use in quantum information technologies.

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Fig. 1: Schematic representation of a device for surface acoustic wave-driven transport of excitons in a WSe2 monolayer.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. GISC, Departamento de Física de Materiales, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

    Jorge Quereda

  2. Materials Science Factory, Instituto de Ciencia de Materiales de Madrid (ICMM-CSIC), Madrid, Spain

    Andres Castellanos-Gomez

Authors
  1. Jorge Quereda
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  2. Andres Castellanos-Gomez
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Correspondence to Jorge Quereda or Andres Castellanos-Gomez.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Quereda, J., Castellanos-Gomez, A. Excitons surf the waves. Nat. Photon. 16, 179–180 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-022-00964-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-022-00964-6

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