ZnO has attracted growing research attention as a strong candidate material for various optoelectronic device applications. It is important to understand and control the interactions between surface plasmons (SPs) and charge carriers in metal-ZnO hybrid nanostructures to improve the optical characteristics. In this work, we fabricated ZnO/Ag nanogratings using patterned polymer and Si templates. Excitation of the surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) well explained the optical reflectance and photoluminescence spectra of the ZnO/Ag nanogratings [1,2]. Nanoscopic mapping of surface photovoltage (SPV), i.e., changes in the surface potential under illumination, obtained by Kelvin probe force microscopy (KPFM) enabled us to investigate the local behaviors of the photo-generated carriers. The magnitude and relaxation time of the measured SPV depended on the wavelength and polarization of the incident light [3]. This showed that the SP excitation in the nanogratings directly affected the creation and recombination processes of the charge carriers. All of these results suggested that SPV measurements using KPFM should be very useful for studying the SP effects in metal/semiconductor hybrid nanostructures.
References
[1] Gwon et al., Opt. Express 19, 5895 (2011).
[2] Gwon et al., ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces. 6, 8602 (2014).
[3] Gwon et al., Sci. Rep. 5, 16727; doi: 10.1038/srep16727 (2015).
We fabricated Si nanopillar (NP) arrays using e-beam lithography and coated them with poly(3-hexylthiophene-2,5-diyl) (P3HT) organic semiconductor layers. Optical reflection spectra showed that Mie resonance significantly increased the scattering cross-sections of the NPs and strongly concentrated incident light in the NPs. Such concentrated light should produce numerous charge carriers and affect the subsequent drift/diffusion of the carriers. Surface photovoltage (SPV), defined as the difference of the surface potential in dark and under light, could reveal the formation and separation of the photo-generated carriers. Especially, Kelvin probe force microscopy technique allowed us to obtain real space SPV maps with nanoscopic spatial resolution. The SPV values at the NP tops were much larger than those at the flat regions around the NPs. This study would provide us insights into improving performance of organic/inorganic hybrid nanostructure-based devices.
Recently, extraordinary physical properties of two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) have attracted great attention for various device applications, including photodetectors, field effect transistors, and chemical sensors. There have been intensive research efforts to grow high-quality and large area TMD thin films, and chemical vapor deposition (CVD) techniques enable scalable growth of layered MoS2 films. We investigated the roles of Au nanoparticles (NPs) on the transport and photoresponse of the CVD-grown MoS2 thin films. The Au NPs increased conductivity and enabled fast photoresponse of MoS2 thin films. These results showed that decoration of metal NPs were useful means to tailor the physical properties of CVD-grown MoS2 thin films. To clarify the roles of the metal particles, we compared the transport characteristics of MoS2 thin films with and without the Au NPs in different gas ambient conditions (N2, O2, and H2/N2). The ambient-dependence of the MoS2 thin films allowed us to discuss possible scenarios to explain our results based on considerations of band bending near the Au NPs, gas adsorption/desorption and subsequent charge transfer, and charge scattering/trapping by defect states.
We investigated optical properties of planar Si wafers and Si microwire (MW) arrays with and without ZnO thin films using the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method. Reflectance of the MW array (diameter: 4 μm and period: 12 μm) was smaller than that of the planar wafer in the wavelength range from 400 to 1100 nm, which could be originated from antireflection effects due to low optical density and guided-mode-assisted field enhancement. The reflectance of ZnO (thickness: 50 and 80 nm)-coated MW array was drastically reduced compared with the bare array but somewhat larger than that of the coated planar wafer. This could be attributed to less-confined guided modes in the wires, which was supported by the field distribution simulation results. Our results provide some insights into possible roles of transparent conducting layers on MW arrays for photovoltaic applications.
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