A low cost plasmonic platform for photon emission engineering of two dimensional semiconductors

TL;DR

This paper presents a cost-effective, large-area nanocone platform that enhances photon emission from 2D semiconductors, enabling optical response engineering with significant PL enhancement and tunable exciton-trion contributions.

Contribution

The study introduces a low-cost, scalable nanocone platform for integrating 2D semiconductors, achieving substantial photoluminescence enhancement and emission engineering.

Findings

PL enhancement of 8-10 times for monolayer WSe₂

Finite-difference time-domain simulations confirm experimental results

Platform enables control over exciton-trion emission contributions

Abstract

Although the field of 2D materials has democratized materials science by making high quality samples accessible cheaply, due to the atomically thin nature of these systems, an integration with nanostructures is almost always required to obtain a significant optical response. Traditionally, these nanostructures are fabricated via electron beam lithography or focused ion beam milling, which are expensive and large area fabrication can be further time consuming. In order to overcome this problem, we report the integration of 2D semiconductors on a cost-effective and large area fabricated nanocone platform. We show that the plasmon modes of our nanocone structures lead to photoluminescence (PL) enhancement of monolayer WSe$_2$ by about eight to ten times compared to the non-plasmonic case, consistent with finite-difference time-domain simulations. Excitation power-dependent measurements reveal that our nanocone platform enables a versatile route to engineering the relative exciton trion contributions to the emission.