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Resonant tunnelling diodes based on twisted black phosphorus homostructures

Nature Electronics volume 4, pages 269–276 (2021)Cite this article

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An Author Correction to this article was published on 09 July 2021

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Abstract

Atomically thin materials can be used to build novel forms of conventional semiconductor heterostructure devices. One such device is a resonant tunnelling diode, which can exhibit negative differential resistance and usually consists of a quantum-well structure between two barrier layers. Here, we show that a twisted black phosphorus homostructure can be used to create a resonant tunnelling diode. The devices have a trilayer structure in which a thin non-degenerate black phosphorus layer is sandwiched between two thicker degenerate black phosphorus layers. The interlayer coupling strength depends sensitively on the twist angle between the layers, and thus the twist angle can be used to control the vertical transport behaviour, from ohmic to tunnelling. Because resonant tunnelling through quantum-well states occurs without the need for a physical tunnelling barrier, our devices exhibit a higher tunnelling conductance and negative differential resistance peak-to-valley current ratio than resonant tunnelling diodes based on van der Waals heterostructures.

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Fig. 1: Device and band structures of BP homojunctions with twist angles of ~90° and 0°.
Fig. 2: Current transport across BP bilayer and trilayer homojunctions.
Fig. 3: Quantum-well formation and resonant tunnelling in the trilayer orthogonal homojunction.
Fig. 4: Temperature-dependent resonant tunnelling in a BP homojunction device.

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The data that support the plots within this paper and other findings of this study are available from the corresponding authors upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF; grants NRF-2016K1A1A2912707, 2016R1A6A3A11934734, 2016R1A2B4012931, 2018R1D1A1B07049669, 2019R1I1A1A01061466 and 2020R1A2C2014687), funded by the Ministry of Science and ICT of Korea, Samsung Research Funding Center of Samsung Electronics (project no. SRFC-TB1803-04) and the KISTI supercomputing centre (grant no. KSC-2018-CRE-0119).

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Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Pawan Kumar Srivastava, Yasir Hassan, Duarte J. P. de Sousa.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Mechanical Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon, South Korea

    Pawan Kumar Srivastava, Minwoong Joe, Budhi Singh & Changgu Lee

  2. SKKU Advanced Institute of Nanotechnology (SAINT), Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon, South Korea

    Yasir Hassan, Yisehak Gebredingle, Fida Ali, Yang Zheng, Won Jong Yoo & Changgu Lee

  3. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA

    Duarte J. P. de Sousa & Tony Low

  4. School of Physical Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India

    Subhasis Ghosh

  5. Department of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

    James T. Teherani

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Contributions

B.S., P.K.S. and C.L. conceived the project. Y.H. prepared the devices with help from Y.Z. for electron-beam lithography. P.K.S. and Y.H. carried out electrical measurements. D.J.P.d.S. and T.L. carried out quantum transport simulations. Y.G. and M.J. carried out DFT calculations for twisted and non-twisted BP bilayer band structures. F.A. and W.J.Y. helped with the glove box facility and its use. P.K.S., D.J.P.d.S., S.G., J.T.T., B.S., T.L. and C.L. discussed and analysed the data. P.K.S., C.L., B.S., D.J.P.d.S. and T.L. co-wrote the manuscript. All authors discussed the results and commented on the manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Budhi Singh, Tony Low or Changgu Lee.

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Peer review information Nature Electronics thanks Yuerui Lu and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Figs. 1–6, Discussion and Tables 1–3.

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Srivastava, P.K., Hassan, Y., de Sousa, D.J.P. et al. Resonant tunnelling diodes based on twisted black phosphorus homostructures. Nat Electron 4, 269–276 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-021-00549-1

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