Monolayer breakthrough heralds better displays

The team, led by engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, has found a way of improving the quality of monolayer semiconductors, a class of atomically thin materials thought to hold promise in the development of transparent LED displays, ultra-high efficiency solar cells, photo detectors and nanoscale transistors.

In the past, the performance of this material has been hampered by the fact that it is typically riddled with defects, however the group has found a way to fix these defects through the use of an organic superacid which it claims has led to a 100-fold increase in the material’s photoluminescence quantum yield, a ratio describing the amount of light generated by the material versus the amount of energy put in. The greater the emission of light, the higher the quantum yield and the better the material quality.

The findings, published in Science, opens the door to the practical application of monolayer materials, such as MoS2, in optoelectronic devices and high-performance transistors. MoS2 is a mere seven-tenths of a nanometer thick.