Engineering Electronic States, Energy Transfer and Disorder in Nanomaterials Through the External Environment

There is a rich variety of semiconductor nanostructures available today for the design of novel material systems and interfaces with tailor-made functionalities. In particular, atomically thin two-dimensional materials such as graphene and transition metal dichalcogenide (TMDC) monolayers exhibit extraordinary optical and electrical properties.

For such materials, with thicknesses below a nanometer, I will show that the external dielectric environment strongly influences their electronic and excitonic states, corresponding disorder, and energy transfer processes. I will also briefly discuss the use of ultrafast electron diffraction to track thermal transport in 2D heterostructures.

The possibility to non-invasively engineer material properties and dynamics by tuning the local environment rather than the material itself yields a new paradigm for nanoscale devices and energy conversion processes.

Speaker: Archana Raja, Lawrence Berkeley National Labs