Abstract
The strong Coulombic interactions in miniaturized structures can lead to efficient carrier multiplication, which is essential for many-body physics and design of efficient photonic devices beyond thermodynamic conversion limits. However, carrier multiplication has rarely been realized in layered semiconducting materials despite strong electronic interactions. Here, we report the experimental observation of unusual carrier multiplication in a multilayer black phosphorus device. Electric field-dependent Hall measurements confirm a substantial increase of carrier density in multilayer black phosphorus channel, which is attributed to the impact ionization by energetic carriers. This mechanism relies on the generation of self-heating induced charge carriers under the large electric field due to competition between electron–electron and electron–phonon interactions in the direct and narrow band gap (0.3 eV) of the multilayer black phosphorus. These findings point the way toward utilization of carrier multiplication to enhance the performance of electronics and optoelectronics devices based on two-dimensional materials.
Highlights
The strong Coulombic interactions in miniaturized structures can lead to efficient carrier multiplication, which is essential for many-body physics and design of efficient photonic devices beyond thermodynamic conversion limits
Impact ionization has been studied in bulk semiconductors[6], and has been observed in several miniaturized structures as the relaxation dynamics are strongly modified with scaling via quantum confinement effects[7,8,9]
We report the realization of efficient carrier multiplication (CM) due to impact ionization by hot carriers in multilayer black Phosphorus (BP) devices, which feature a narrow and direct band gap (0.3 eV) and a high carrier mobility[11]
Summary
The strong Coulombic interactions in miniaturized structures can lead to efficient carrier multiplication, which is essential for many-body physics and design of efficient photonic devices beyond thermodynamic conversion limits. This mechanism relies on the generation of selfheating induced charge carriers under the large electric field due to competition between electron–electron and electron–phonon interactions in the direct and narrow band gap (0.3 eV) of the multilayer black phosphorus These findings point the way toward utilization of carrier multiplication to enhance the performance of electronics and optoelectronics devices based on two-dimensional materials. We attribute the origin of the super-linear behavior to CM due to impact ionization by hot carriers in the BP channel under low dielectric screening conditions, because the generated charge carriers appear to overwhelm current saturation at high electric fields. This study will be helpful for realizing practical and energy efficient low-power optoelectronic devices
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