High-Performance WS2 Monolayer Light-Emitting Tunneling Devices Using 2D Materials Grown by Chemical Vapor Deposition

• Published in: ACS nano Vol. 13; no. 4; pp. 4530 - 4537
• Main Authors: Sheng, Yuewen, Chen, Tongxin, Lu, Yang, Chang, Ren-Jie, Sinha, Sapna, Warner, Jamie H
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: American Chemical Society 23.04.2019
• Subjects: light-emitting devices; heterostructures; chemical vapor deposition; WS2; 2D materials
• ISSN: 1936-0851; 1936-086X
• DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.9b00211

The solid progress in the study of a single two-dimensional (2D) material underpins the development for creating 2D material assemblies with various electronic and optoelectronic properties. We introduce an asymmetric structure by stacking monolayer semiconducting tungsten disulfide, metallic graphene, and insulating boron nitride to fabricate numerous red channel light-emitting devices (LEDs). All the 2D crystals were grown by chemical vapor deposition (CVD), which has great potential for future industrial scale-up. Our LEDs exhibit visibly observable electroluminescence (EL) at both 5.5 V forward and 7.0 V backward biasing, which correlates well with our asymmetric design. The red emission can last for at least several minutes, and the success rate of the working device that can emit detectable EL is up to 80%. In addition, we show that sample degradation is prone to happen when a continuing bias, much higher than the threshold voltage, is applied. Our success of using high-quality CVD-grown 2D materials for red light emitters is expected to provide the basis for flexible and transparent displays.