Enhanced Light-Matter Interaction in Graphene/h-BN van der Waals Heterostructures

Abstract

By investigating the optoelectronic properties of prototypical graphene/hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) heterostructures, we demonstrate how a nanostructured combination of these materials can lead to a dramatic enhancement of light-matter interaction and give rise to unique excitations. In the framework of ab initio many-body perturbation theory, we show that such heterostructures absorb light over a broad frequency range, from the near-infrared to the ultraviolet (UV), and that each spectral region is characterized by a specific type of excitations. Delocalized electron-hole pairs in graphene dominate the low-energy part of the spectrum, while strongly bound electron-hole pairs in h-BN are preserved in the near-UV. Besides these features, characteristic of the pristine constituents, charge-transfer excitations appear across the visible region. Remarkably, the spatial distribution of the electron and the hole can be selectively tuned by modulating the stacking arrangement of the individual building blocks. Our results open up unprecedented perspectives in view of designing van der Waals heterostructures with tailored optoelectronic features.

References in corpus (21)

• The electronic properties of graphene
• Boron nitride substrates for high-quality graphene electronics
• Ultrafast Charge Transfer in Atomically Thin MoS2/WS2 Heterostructures
• Measurement of the Optical Conductivity of Graphene
• Observation of Long-Lived Interlayer Excitons in Monolayer MoSe2-WSe2 Heterostructures
• Light-emitting diodes by bandstructure engineering in van der Waals heterostructures
• Micrometer-scale ballistic transport in encapsulated graphene at room temperature
• STM Spectroscopy of ultra-flat graphene on hexagonal boron nitride
• Emergence of Superlattice Dirac Points in Graphene on Hexagonal Boron Nitride
• Strong interlayer coupling in van der Waals heterostructures built from single-layer chalcogenides
• Highly confined low-loss plasmons in graphene-boron nitride heterostructures
• Colloquium: The transport properties of graphene: An introduction
• Atomically thin boron nitride: a tunnelling barrier for graphene devices
• Renormalization of Molecular Electronic Levels at Metal-Molecule Interfaces
• Excitonic Effects on the Optical Response of Graphene and Bilayer Graphene
• Twist-controlled resonant tunnelling in graphene-boron nitride-graphene heterostructures
• Observation of an intrinsic bandgap and Landau level renormalization in graphene/boron-nitride heterostructures
• Moir{é} patterns as a probe of interplanar interactions: graphene on h-BN
• Electronic structure of spontaneously strained graphene on hexagonal Boron Nitride
• Speeding up the solution of the Bethe-Salpeter equation by a double-grid method and Wannier interpolation
• Band renormalization of a polymer physisorbed on graphene investigated by many-body perturbation theory