Environmental Screening Effects in 2D Materials: Renormalization of the Bandgap, Electronic Structure, and Optical Spectra of Few-Layer Black Phosphorus
- Univ. of California, Berkeley, CA (United States); Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
Few-layer black phosphorus has recently emerged as a potential 2D semiconductor, notable for its widely tunable bandgap, highly anisotropic properties, and theoretically predicted large exciton binding energies. To avoid degradation, it has become common practice to encapsulate black phosphorus devices. It is generally assumed that this encapsulation does not qualitatively affect their optical properties. In this work, we show that the contrary is true. We have performed ab initio GW and GW plus Bethe–Salpeter equation (GW-BSE) calculations to determine the quasiparticle (QP) band structure and optical spectrum of one-layer (1L) through four-layer (4L) black phosphorus, with and without encapsulation between hexagonal boron nitride and sapphire. We show that black phosphorus is exceptionally sensitive to environmental screening. Encapsulation reduces the exciton binding energy in 1L by as much as 70% and completely eliminates the presence of a bound exciton in the 4L structure. The reduction in the exciton binding energies is offset by a similarly large renormalization of the QP bandgap so that the optical gap remains nearly unchanged, yet the nature of the excited states and the qualitative features of the absorption spectrum change dramatically.
- Research Organization:
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States). National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC), Basic Energy Sciences (BES) (SC-22). Materials Sciences & Engineering Division
- Grant/Contract Number:
- AC02-05CH11231
- OSTI ID:
- 1484732
- Journal Information:
- Nano Letters, Vol. 17, Issue 8; ISSN 1530-6984
- Publisher:
- American Chemical SocietyCopyright Statement
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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