Abstract
The rapidly increasing use of sensors throughout different research disciplines and the demand for more efficient devices with less power consumption depends critically on the emergence of new sensor materials and novel sensor concepts. Atomically thin transition metal dichalcogenides have a huge potential for sensor development within a wide range of applications. Their optimal surface-to-volume ratio combined with strong light–matter interaction results in a high sensitivity to changes in their surroundings. Here, we present a highly efficient sensing mechanism to detect molecules based on dark excitons in these materials. We show that the presence of molecules with a dipole moment transforms dark states into bright excitons, resulting in an additional pronounced peak in easy accessible optical spectra. This effect exhibits a huge potential for sensor applications, since it offers an unambiguous optical fingerprint for the detection of molecules—in contrast to common sensing schemes relying on small peak shifts and intensity changes.
Highlights
The rapidly increasing use of sensors throughout different research disciplines and the demand for more efficient devices with less power consumption depends critically on the emergence of new sensor materials and novel sensor concepts
We show that an efficient coupling between dark and bright transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) excitons and non-covalently attached molecules with a strong dipole moment can turn the dark KL exciton bright resulting in an additional peak in optical spectra
Our theoretical approach is based on the Wannier equation providing access to eigenvalues and eigenfunctions for bright and dark excitons and the Bloch equation for the microscopic polarization giving access to excitonic optical spectra including the interaction with externally attached molecules
Summary
The rapidly increasing use of sensors throughout different research disciplines and the demand for more efficient devices with less power consumption depends critically on the emergence of new sensor materials and novel sensor concepts. We show that the presence of molecules with a dipole moment transforms dark states into bright excitons, resulting in an additional pronounced peak in easy accessible optical spectra This effect exhibits a huge potential for sensor applications, since it offers an unambiguous optical fingerprint for the detection of molecules—in contrast to common sensing schemes relying on small peak shifts and intensity changes. We show that an efficient coupling between dark and bright TMD excitons and non-covalently attached molecules with a strong dipole moment can turn the dark KL exciton bright resulting in an additional peak in optical spectra (see Fig. 1c) This effect exhibits a huge potential for sensor applications, since it offers a clear optical fingerprint for the detection of molecules
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