Intercalation is known to be an efficient method for tuning the band structure of layered materials to bring out superconductivity, without significantly altering the crystal structure of the host material. Graphite intercalation compounds and intercalated transitional metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) are two most studied representatives. This thesis presents an experimental study of several new superconductors obtained by intercalation of layered materials, including MoS2, black phosphorus and a topological insulator Bi2Se3. Polymorphism is an essential feature of MoS2. While, superconductivity in doped 2H-MoS2 has been extensively studied. Superconductivity in its 1T and 1T' counterparts has been neither observed, nor even predicted theoretically. In this thesis, we have investigated potassium (K)-intercalated MoS2 and found that doping with K induces both structural and superconducting phase transitions. We demonstrate that all three phases of MoS2 - 2H, 1T and 1T'- become superconducting as a result of intercalation, with critical temperature Tc of 6.9 K, 2.8 K and 4.6 K, respectively. Black phosphorus has been 'rediscovered' in the last few years due to its layered structure and unique electronic properties. This thesis describes successful intercalation of black phosphorus with several alkali metals (Li, K, Rb, Cs) and alkaline earth metal Ca, with all five compounds showing superconductivity. Importantly, and very unexpectedly, the found superconductivity of intercalated black phosphorus is independent of the intercalant, with all five compounds having exactly the same superconducting characteristics (Tc, critical fields, anisotropy). We suggest that the superconductivity is due to heavily doped phosphorene layers, with alkali metal atoms acting mainly as charge reservoirs. Superconducting topological insulators, such as Bi2Se3, are regarded as the most promising candidates for topological superconductivity. However, the nature of superconductivity in doped Bi2Se3, such as CuxBi2Se3, SrxBi2Se3 and NbxBi2Se3, remains controversial and so far no convincing evidence of topological superconductivity has been reported for these materials. In this thesis, we report superconductivity in a new family of superconductors derived from Bi2Se3, by intercalation with K, Rb and Cs metals. All three superconductors exhibit qualitatively identical but highly anomalous behaviour of magnetisation, with several new features consistent with the properties of topological superconductors. Specifically, the new materials exhibit a highly unusual extra diamagnetic screening in the Meissner state and two coexisting superconducting phase, including surface superconductivity that we attribute to heavily doped surface states of the original topological insulator (Bi2Se3). This work provides a new platform in the study of the interplay between the topological and superconducting orders. In conclusion, superconductivity has been induced in MoS2, black phosphorus and Bi2Se3 through alkali or alkaline earth metal intercalation. The study of these new superconducting materials has been summarised in the thesis.

No description available.

Over the last decade, two dimensional (2D) materials have attracted considerable attention from both the scientific and engineering community due to their unique properties. One important advance of 2D materials is that they can be exfoliated into nanosheets suspended in a liquid phase and that this allows the formulation of 2D nanomaterials inks. Such inks can be deposited as functional components through low-cost inkjet printing techniques. Many 2D materials based inks have been produced over the years. This thesis investigates the use of inkjet printing to deposit 2D materials such as graphene oxide (GO) and black phosphorus (BP).GO, a derivative of graphene, has been widely used to produce graphene-based conductors via inkjet printing owing to its good stability in readily available solvents such as water. In this work, highly conductive reduced graphene oxide (rGO) films with bulk conductivity in excess of 2 × 10^4 Sm-1 have been prepared by inkjet printing a GO aqueous ink, with mean flake size 35.9 micro metre, through a 60 micro metre inkjet printing nozzle followed by a reduction step. Experimental results showed that individual GO flakes up to 200 micro metre diameter can be successfully printed with no instances of nozzle blocking or poor printing performance. The mechanism by which this occurs is believed to be GO sheet folding during drop formation followed by elastic unfolding during drop impact and spreading. In addition, the influence of GO flake size on rGO film conductivity has been investigated. It was found that the rGO film conductivity increased about 60% when the mean flake size of the GO flakes in the ink increases from 0.68 micro metre to 35.9 micro metre. The drying behaviour of printed GO droplets has been studied on eight GO aqueous inks in which the mean flake size of GO was varied over a range from 0.68 to 35.9 micro metre. It was found that the coffee ring effect (inhomogeneous drying of a droplet to leave a ring like deposit) of dried droplets of the GO ink weakened and disappeared when the flake size increasing. It was found that, with a printed deposit around 340 micro metre in diameter, the coffee ring effect (CRE) was suppressed with the mean flake size > 10.3 micro metre. The critical flake size for CRE suppression reduced to 5.97 and 3.68 micro metre when the substrate temperature was 40 and 50 °C, respectively. It was further found that the CRE weakened with decreasing printed drop size, with the critical flake size reducing to 1.58 micro metre with a printed drop diameter of 30 micro metre.The interaction between BP nanometre thickness flakes and humid atmospheres was investigated using an inkjet printed BP sensor. The BP sensor showed was very sensitive to changes in humidity with a response time of a few seconds and the effect is reproducible in minutes. However, long term exposure to humid air with a relative humidity (RH) > 11% leads to a significant chemical change in the BP films, with Fourier transform infra-red spectroscopy (FTIR) indicating partial hydrolysis of the BP to form phosphate and phosphonate ions. Low temperature heat treatment of BP films under dry conditions after exposure to elevated RH leads to a partial recovery of the impedance response and reversion to a chemical state similar to that before exposure to a humid environment. The recovery of BP properties is most complete after exposure to lower humidity environments (RH < 11%), although exact replication of the original impedance response and FTIR spectrum was not possible.

Les dispositifs à base de silicium, industrialisés aujourd’hui pour les systèmes électroniques, atteignent leurs limites en termes de miniaturisation et de performances. La course à l’innovation et à la miniaturisation vise aujourd’hui à dépasser cette limite en intégrant de nouveaux matériaux dans les dispositifs, en couplant d’autres phénomènes physiques de l’optique à l’électronique haute fréquence. Le travail conduit pendant cette thèse porte sur la caractérisation du phosphore noir (bP) pour des applications dans le domaine de l'optoélectronique hyperfréquence avec une application spécifique aux interrupteurs microondes pilotés optiquement à 1,55 µm. La caractérisation du bP passe par le développement de techniques de fabrication de couches bidimensionnels de bP et également par la détermination de l'influence des matériaux annexes utilisés sur les propriétés de la couche. Cela a été couplé à une étude optique pour connaitre la réponse du bP à une excitation laser à 1,55 µm. La détermination de paramètres intrinsèques spécifiques du matériau tels que le temps de vie des photoporteurs, la résistivité et la permittivité a été conduite par l'intermédiaire d'expériences de caractérisation dans le domaine optique, radiofréquence et électronique (DC). Les résultats obtenus confirment l’intérêt du bP pour ce genre d'application et ont permis l'intégration du matériau dans le dispositif hyperfréquence visé. Les résultats obtenus lors de tests préliminaires présentés dans ce mémoire sont très encourageants et ouvre la voie à de nombreuses applications ultra-rapide à haute fréquence. / The research project conducted focuses on the optoelectronic and high frequency characterization of black phosphorus. The context of this project is the trend of downscaling and multi-physical coupling seen today in industrial electronics. The characterization carried out is directed for a specific application, the realisation of microwave photoswitch controlled by a laser optical excitation at 1.55 µm. For this purpose, during this PhD a production process of thin and large bi-dimensional layers of black phosphorus has been performed, along with the fabrication of characterization devices, and a discussion to determine suitable appendices for substrate, capping layer and metallization. The technological development is coupled with optical, electronic (DC) and radiofrequency characterizations of the bi-dimensional layers for the determination of inherent black phosphorus properties like the photogenerated carrier lifetime, the material permittivity, the resistivity and the mobility of the carriers. Those parameters are essential to understanding design and simulate high frequency optoelectronic devices on black phosphorus such as the microwave photoswitch controlled at 1.55 µm. The obtained results assert black phosphorus as a promising material for this kind of application. The first performances obtained with the use of bP as an active material for photoconductive switching are very encouraging and open the way for high frequency and high speed applications.

The intent of this thesis is to improve upon previously proposed tight-binding models for one dimensional black phosphorus, or phosphorene. Previous models offer only a qualitative analysis of the band structure of phosphorene, and fail to fully realize critical elements in the electronic band structure necessary for transport calculations. In this work we propose an improved tight-binding model for phosphorene by including up to eight nearest-neighbor interactions. The efficacy of the model is verified by comparison with DFT-HSE06 calculations, and the anisotropy of the effective masses in the armchair and zigzag directions is considered.

<p>Since the discovery of graphene, two-dimensional (2D) materials have attracted broad interests for transistor applications due to their atomically thin nature. This thesis studies nano-transistors based on 2D materials for several novel applications, including tunneling transistors for low-power electronics and reconfigurable transistors for hardware security.</p><p>The first part of the thesis focuses on tunneling field-effect transistors (TFETs). Since the current injection in a conventional MOSFET depends on thermionic injection over a gate-controlled barrier, the subthreshold swing (SS) of MOSFET is fundamentally limited to 60 mV/dec at room temperature, hindering the supply voltage scaling of integrated circuits (ICs). Utilizing band-to-band tunneling (BTBT) as current injection mechanism, TFETs overcome the SS limit by filtering out the Fermi tail in the source and achieve steep-slope switching. However, existing demonstrations of TFETs are plagued by low on-currents and degraded SS, largely due to the large tunneling distances caused by non-scaled body thicknesses, making 2D materials a promising candidate as channel materials for TFETs. In this thesis, we demonstrate a prototype TFET based on black phosphorus (BP) adopting electrostatic doping that is tuned by multiple top-gates, which allows the device to be reconfigured into multiple operation modes. The band-to-band tunneling mechanism is further confirmed by source-doping-dependent and temperature-dependent measurements, and the performance improvement of BP TFETs with further body and oxide thicknesses scaling is projected by atomistic simulation. In addition, a vertical BP TFET with a large tunneling area is also demonstrated, and negative differential resistance (NDR) is observed in the device.</p><p>The second part of the thesis focuses on reconfigurable nano-transistors with tunable p- and n-type operations and the implementation of hardware security based on such transistors. Polymorphic gate has been proposed as a hardware security primitive to protect the intellectual property of ICs from reverse engineering, and its operation requires transistors that can be reconfigured between p-type and n-type. However, a traditional CMOS transistor relies on substitutional doping, and thus its polarity cannot be altered after the fabrication. By contrast, 2D nano-transistors can attain both electron and hole injections. In this thesis, we review the Schottky-barrier injection in 2D transistors and demonstrate the feasibility of achieving complementary p-type and n-type transistors using BP as channel material by adopting metal contacts with different work functions. In this design, however, the discrepancy in the p-FET and n-FET device structures makes it unsuitable for reconfigurable transistors. Therefore, we continue to modify the device design to enable reconfigurable p-type and n-type operations in the same BP transistor. Finally, a NAND/NOR polymorphic gate is experimentally demonstrated based on the reconfigurable BP transistors, showing the feasibility of using 2D materials to enable hardware security.</p><p>In the last part, we demonstrate an artificial sub-60 mV/dec switching in a metal-insulator-metal-insulator-semiconductor (MIMIS) transistor. Negative capacitance FETs (NC-FETs) have attracted wide interest as promising candidates for steep-slope devices. However, the detailed mechanisms of the observed steep-slope switching are under intense debate. We show that sub-60 mV/dec switching can be observed in a WS2 transistor with an MIMIS structure – without any ferroelectric component. Using a resistor-capacitor (RC) network model, we show that the observed steep-slope switching can be attributed to the internal gate voltage response to the chosen varying gate voltage scan rates. Our results indicate that the measurement-related artefacts can lead to observation of sub-60 mV/dec switching and that experimentalists need to critically assess their measurement setups.</p>

No description available.

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento CientÃfico e TecnolÃgico / A possibilidade de se obter sistemas bidimensionais a partir de materiais com estrutura cristalina lamelar tem atraÃdo muitas pesquisas nesses materiais, pois as propriedades de poucas camadas diferem bastante dos seus respectivos bulks, o que abre uma gama de possibilidades em aplicaÃÃes tecnolÃgicas. O fÃsforo negro apresenta muitas propriedades interessantes, dentre elas, um gap de energia, que garante a construÃÃo de dispositivos eletrÃnicos (bem diferente do grafeno que à um semi metal sem gap). Esse gap pode ser ajustado aumentando o nÃmero de camadas, variando de 0.3 eV para uma monocamada atà cerca de 2.0 eV para o bulk, cobrindo um espectro de energia de gap relativamente grande de dispositivos Ãpticos. AlÃm disso, esse material à altamente anisotrÃpico em sua estrutura de bandas. Neste trabalho, derivamos a aproximaÃÃo da massa efetiva a partir do modelo tight-binding e usamos o Hamiltoniano aproximado para estudar nanoestruturas de fÃsforo negro. Nesse modelo, o carÃter anisotrÃpico do fÃsforo negro à refletido na diferenÃa entre as massas efetivas quando se toma diferentes direÃÃes. Primeiramente, comparamos os resultados numÃrico obtido atravÃs da tÃcnica de diferenÃas finitas com o modelo analÃtico para um ponto quÃntico circular, que devido à estrutura de bandas ter um contorno elÃptico, à descrito pelas equaÃÃes de Mathieu quando se resolve a equaÃÃo de SchrÃdinger. Os resultados analÃtico e numÃrico mostram boa concordÃncia. Ainda na aproximaÃÃo da massa efetiva, estudamos o efeito de campos externos sobre um anel quÃntico de fÃsforo negro e analisamos o efeito da interaÃÃo entre esses campos e a anisotropia de massa do sistema sobre seus estados eletrÃnicos. Devido à anisotropia de massa, esse sistema quando sujeito a um campo magnÃtico, nÃo apresenta oscilaÃÃes Aharonov-Bohm, que podem ser recuperadas aplicando-se um potencial de confinamento elÃptico. Estudamos tambÃm o efeito de um campo elÃtrico nas direÃÃes x e y em um anel quÃntico, e verificamos como a energia à alterada pelo campo. Nossos resultados mostram que, como consequÃncia de uma localizaÃÃo da funÃÃo de onda causada pela anisotropia de massa, os nÃveis de energia decrescem quadraticamente (efeito Stark) com o campo aplicado apontando para a direÃÃo armchair, enquanto um decrÃscimo quase linear (efeito Stark linear) aparece para um campo aplicado na direÃÃo zigzag, com uma sÃrie de estados que se cruzam, levando a um comportamento semelhante ao de um poÃo quÃntico duplo sob um campo elÃtrico perpendicular a ele. / The possibility of obtaining two-dimensional systems from layered materials has been attracting a lot of research on these materials, since their few layer properties are very different from their respective bulk ones, which opens up great possibilities in technological applications. Black phosphorus exhibit several interesting properties, among them, a direct energy gap, that enables the possibility of fabricating electronic devices (in contrast e.g. with the gapless semi-metallic graphene), and which can be tuned by the number of layers, varying from 0.3 eV for a bulk up to 2.0 eV for a monolayer, thus covering a relatively large range of the energy spectrum for optical devices. Besides, the fact that this is a very anisotropic material has brought even more attention to it, towards novel ways of exploring this anisotropy in new technologies. In this work, we have derived the effective mass approximation from the tight binding model and used the out coming approximate Hamiltonian to study nanostructures based on monolayer black phosphorus. In this model, the anisotropic features of black phosphorus are reflected in the difference between effective masses in different directions. Firstly, we compare the finite difference methods with the analytical solution for a circular quantum dot, which, due to its elliptical contour of energy bands, is given by Mathieu functions for solving the resulting SchrÃdinger equation. With this comparison, we verify the compatibility between these methods. Within the effective mass approximation, we investigate the effect of external electromagnetic fields on a black phosphorus quantum ring, thus analysing the effect of the interplay between these fields and the system anisotropy on its electronic states. Due to the anisotropy, under an applied magnetic field, this ring does not exhibit Aharonov-Bohm oscillations, which can be recovered by assuming an elliptic ring-like confinement. We also investigate the effect of an external electric field applied in x and y directions in a black phosphorus quantum ring on its energy levels. Our results show that, as a consequence of a wave function localization induced by mass anisotropy, energy levels decay quadratically (Stark effect) with the field if it is applied along the armchair direction, whereas an almost linear Stark effect, along with a series of crossing excited states, is observed for a field applied in the zigzag direction, leading to a behavior that is in close resemblance to a double quantum well under a perpendicular electric field.

<p>The demand for the faster information transport and better computational abilities is ever increasing. In the last few decades, the electronic industry has met this requirement by increasing the number of transistors per square inch. This lead to the scaling of devices to tens of nm. However, the speed of the electronics is limited to few GHz. Using light, the operating speed of photonic devices can be much larger than GHz. But the photonic devices are diffraction limited and hence the size of photonic device is much larger than the electronic components. Plasmonics is an emerging field with light-induced surface excitations, and can manipulate the light at nanoscale. It can bridge the gap between electronics and photonics. </p> <p>With the present scaling of devices to few nm, the scientific community is looking for alternatives for continued progress. This has opened up several promising routes recently, including two-dimensional materials, quantum computing, topological computing, spintronics and valleytronics. The discovery of graphene has led to the immense interest in the field of two-dimensional materials. Two dimensional-materials have extraordinary properties compared to its bulk. This work discusses the applications of plasmonics in this emerging field of two-dimensional materials and for heat assisted magnetic recording.</p> <p>Black phosphorus is an emerging low-direct bandgap two-dimensional semiconductor, with anisotropic optical and electronic properties. It has high mobility and is promising for photo detection at infrared wavelengths due to its low band gap. We demonstrate two different plasmonic designs to enhance the photo responsivity of black phosphours by localized surface plasmons. We use bowtie antenna and bowtie apertures to increase the absorption and polarization selectivity respectively. Plasmonic structures are designed by numerical electromagnetic simulations, and are fabricated to experimentally demonstrate the enhanced photo responsivity of black phosphorus. </p> <p>Next, we look at another emerging two-dimensional material, bismuth telluride selenide (Bi₂Te₂Se). It is a topological insulator with an insulating bulk but conducting electronic surface states. These surface states are Dirac like, similar to graphene and can lead to exotic plasmonic phenomena. We investigated the optical properties of Bi₂Te₂Se and found that the bulk is plasmonic below 650 nm wavelength. We study the distinct surface plasmons arising from the bulk and surface state of the topological insulator, Bi₂Te₂Se. The propagating surface plasmons at a nanoscale slit in Bi₂Te₂Se are imaged using near-field scanning optical microscopy. The surface state plasmons are studied with a below band gap excitation of 10.6 µm wavelength and the surface plasmons of the bulk are studied with a visible wavelength of 633 nm. The surface state plasmon wavelength is 100 times shorter than the incident wavelength in sharp contrast to the plasmon wavelength of the bulk. </p> <p>Next, we look at the application of plasmonics in heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR). HAMR is one of the next generation data storage technology that can increase the areal density to beyond 1 Tb/in². Near-field transducer (NFT) is a key component of the HAMR system that locally heats the recording medium by concentrating light below the diffraction limit using surface plasmons. In this work, we use density-based topology optimization for inverse design of NFT for a desired temperature profile in the recording medium. We first perform an inverse thermal calculation to obtain the required volumetric heat generation (electric field) for a desired temperature profile. Then an inverse electromagnetic design of NFT is performed for achieving the desired electric field. NFT designs for both generating a small heated spot size and a heated spot with desired aspect ratio in recording medium are demonstrated. The effect of waveguide, write pole and moving recording medium on the heated spot size is also investigated. </p>

No description available.