Gear up for those Transparent LEDs with a Different Breed of Monolayers

Researchers at the University of California have devised an easy trick of creating monolayer semiconductors. These will be thinner than a nanometre and certainly, free of defects. These efficient titbits of technology have several practical applications as well.

With the reports being on-board, the door to exclusive practical applications opens up, offering fruitful insights into high-performance chipsets, LEDs, MOS2 and futuristic transistors that will soon be refurbished with this latest technology.

According to the researchers, the study has given way to optoelectronic monolayers that might just pave way for the much improved LED displays. These LEDs will be high on performance quotient and are expected to be transparent, when the power is turned off.  

Monolayers are the newest breed of semiconductors, promising a lot in terms of intuition. Besides these premium Light Emitting Diodes, one might consider solar cells with ultra-high efficiency and the nanoscale transistors. However, before the culmination of the optoelectronic technology, these monolayer films were riddled with restrictive defects.

The team of researchers have developed a fix, in the form of an organic super-acid that actually works. The films need to be treated chemically and that would result in a 100-fold enhancement of the overall photoluminescence and quantum yield. In a layman’s language, this figure determines the ratio of emitted light to the amount of input energy.

The recent fabrication technique with super-acid will result in a better material quality, heavily improving upon the quantum yield. One path-breaking innovation is how the quantum yield for molybdenum disulfide has been improve by dipping the same in bistriflimide, a variant of super-acid. MOS2 is now an improved option with the yield being increased up to 100 percent.

Principal Investigator Professor Ali Javey theorized that defects are quite common in thinner materials but the latest inclusion of opto-electronically enhanced monolayers will certainly improve the future and is a study, worth looking at.

Gadgets will hugely benefit from this technology as the potential for electronic transistors, in massive. Defects in smallest of chips are impossible to correct and these error free monolayers will be the perfect companion for gadgets. Another upcoming aspect is the usage of optoelectronic monolayers in ‘low-energy switches’.