0000000001193640
AUTHOR
Alejandro Molina-sanchez
showing 17 related works from this author
Spin-layer locking of interlayer excitons trapped in moir\'e potentials
2019
Van der Waals heterostructures offer attractive opportunities to design quantum materials. For instance, transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) possess three quantum degrees of freedom: spin, valley index, and layer index. Further, twisted TMD heterobilayers can form moir\'e patterns that modulate the electronic band structure according to atomic registry, leading to spatial confinement of interlayer exciton (IXs). Here we report the observation of spin-layer locking of IXs trapped in moir\'e potentials formed in a heterostructure of bilayer 2H-MoSe$_2$ and monolayer WSe$_2$. The phenomenon of locked electron spin and layer index leads to two quantum-confined IX species with distinct spin-…
Inhomogeneous free-electron distribution in InN nanowires: Photoluminescence excitation experiments
2010
Photoluminescence excitation (PLE) spectra have been measured for a set of self-assembled InN nanowires (NWs) and a high-crystalline quality InN layer grown by molecular-beam epitaxy. The PLE experimental lineshapes have been reproduced by a self-consistent calculation of the absorption in a cylindrical InN NW. The differences in the PLE spectra can be accounted for the inhomogeneous electron distribution within the NWs caused by a bulk donor concentration $({N}_{D}^{+})$ and a two-dimensional density of ionized surface states $({N}_{ss}^{+})$. For NW radii larger than 30 nm, ${N}_{D}^{+}$ and ${N}_{ss}^{+}$ modify the absorption edge and the lineshape, respectively, and can be determined f…
LDA+Uand tight-binding electronic structure of InN nanowires
2013
In this paper we employ a combined ab initio and tight-binding approach to obtain the electronic and optical properties of hydrogenated Indium nitride InN nanowires. We first discuss InN band structure for the wurtzite structure calculated at the LDA+U level and use this information to extract the parameters needed for an empirical tight-binging implementation. These parameters are then employed to calculate the electronic and optical properties of InN nanowires in a diameter range that would not be affordable by ab initio techniques. The reliability of the large nanowires results is assessed by explicitly comparing the electronic structure of a small diameter wire studied both at LDA+U and…
Anisotropic optical response of GaN and AlN nanowires.
2012
We present a theoretical study of the electronic structure and optical properties of free-standing GaN and AlN nanowires. We have implemented the empirical tight-binding method, with an orbital basis sp(3), that includes the spin-orbit interaction. The passivation of the dangling bonds at the free surfaces is also studied, together with the effects on the electronic structure of the nanowire. For both GaN and AlN nanowires, we have found a remarkable anisotropy of the optical absorption when the light-polarization changes, showing in the case of GaN a dependence on the nanowire size.
Excitons in few-layer hexagonal boron nitride: Davydov splitting and surface localization
2018
Hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) has been attracting great attention because of its strong excitonic effects. Taking into account few-layer systems, we investigate theoretically the effects of the number of layers on quasiparticle energies, absorption spectra, and excitonic states, placing particular focus on the Davydov splitting of the lowest bound excitons. We describe how the inter-layer interaction as well as the variation in electronic screening as a function of layer number $N$ affects the electronic and optical properties. Using both \textit{ab initio} simulations and a tight-binding model for an effective Hamiltonian describing the excitons, we characterize in detail the symmetry of t…
Phonons in MoSe2/WSe2 van der Waals heterobilayer
2021
We report first-principles calculations of the structural and vibrational properties of the synthesized two-dimensional van der Waals heterostructures formed by single-layers dichalcogenides MoSe2 and WSe2. We show that, when combining these systems in a periodic two-dimensional heterostructures, the intrinsic phonon characteristics of the free-standing constituents are to a large extent preserved but, furthermore, exhibit shear and breathing phonon modes that are not present in the individual building blocks. These peculiar modes depend strongly on the weak vdW forces and has a great contibution to the thermal properties of the layered materials. Besides these features, the departure of fl…
Inhomogeneous electron distribution in InN nanowires: Influence on the optical properties
2012
In this work, we study theoretically and experimentally the influence of the surface electron accumulation on the optical properties of InN nanowires. For this purpose, the photoluminescence and photoluminescence excitation spectra have been measured for a set of self-assembled InN NWs grown under different conditions. The photoluminescence excitation experimental lineshapes have been reproduced by a self-consistent calculation of the absorption in a cylindrical InN nanowires. With the self-consistent model we can explore how the optical absorption depends on nanowires radius and doping concentration. Our model solves the Schrodinger equation for a cylindrical nanowire of infinite length, a…
Exciton-Phonon Coupling in the Ultraviolet Absorption and Emission Spectra of Bulk Hexagonal Boron Nitride
2018
We present an \textit{ab initio} method to calculate phonon-assisted absorption and emission spectra in the presence of strong excitonic effects. We apply the method to bulk hexagonal BN which has an indirect band gap and is known for its strong luminescence in the UV range. We first analyse the excitons at the wave vector $\overline{q}$ of the indirect gap. The coupling of these excitons with the various phonon modes at $\overline{q}$ is expressed in terms of a product of the mean square displacement of the atoms and the second derivative of the optical response function with respect to atomic displacement along the phonon eigenvectors. The derivatives are calculated numerically with a fin…
Reversed polarized emission in highly strained a-plane GaN/AlN multiple quantum wells
2010
The polarization of the emission from a set of highly strained $a$-plane GaN/AlN multiple quantum wells of varying well widths has been studied. A single photoluminescence peak is observed that shifts to higher energies as the quantum well thickness decreases due to quantum confinement. The emitted light is linearly polarized. For the thinnest samples the preferential polarization direction is perpendicular to the wurtzite $c$ axis with a degree of polarization that decreases with increasing well width. However, for the thickest well the preferred polarization direction is parallel to the $c$ axis. Raman scattering, x-ray diffraction, and transmission electron microscopy studies have been p…
Strong Exciton-Coherent Phonon Coupling in Single-Layer MoS2
2020
Broadband transient absorption with sub-20fs temporal resolution, supported by ab-initio calculations, quantitatively provides the strength of exciton-coherent phonon coupling in 1L-MoS2, showing a resonant profile around the C exciton.
Intravalley spin-flip relaxation dynamics in single-layer WS2
2019
Two-dimensional Transition Metal Dichalcogenides (TMDs) have been widely studied because of the peculiar electronic band structure and the strong excitonic effects [1]. In these materials the large spin-orbit coupling lifts the spin degeneracy of the valence (VB) and the conduction band (CB) giving rise to the A and B interband excitonic transitions. In monolayer WS2, the spins of electrons in the lowest CB and in the highest VB at K/K' point of the Brillouin zone are antiparallel resulting in an intravalley dark exciton state at a lower energy than the bright exciton, see left panel of Fig.1. On the one hand, the presence of dark excitons has been revealed indirectly from the observation o…
Real-time observation of the intravalley spin-flip process in single-layer WS2
2019
We use helicity-resolved transient absorption spectroscopy to track intravalley scattering dynamics in monolayer WS2. We find that spin-polarized carriers scatter from upper to lower conduction band by reversing their spin orientation on a sub-ps timescale.
Semiempirical pseudopotential approach for nitride-based nanostructures and {\it ab initio} based passivation of free surfaces
2013
We present a semiempirical pseudopotential method based on screened atomic pseudopotentials and derived from \textit{ab initio} calculations. This approach is motivated by the demand for pseudopotentials able to address nanostructures, where \textit{ab initio} methods are both too costly and insufficiently accurate at the level of the local-density approximation, while mesoscopic effective-mass approaches are inapplicable due to the small size of the structures along, at least, one dimension. In this work we improve the traditional pseudopotential method by a two-step process: First, we invert a set of self-consistently determined screened {\it ab initio} potentials in wurtzite GaN for a ra…
Novel Polymorph of GaSe
2021
2D GaSe is a semiconductor belonging to the group of post-transition metal chalcogenides with great potential for advanced optoelectronic applications. The weak interlayer interaction in multilayer 2D materials allows the formation of several polymorphs. Here, the first structural observation of a new GaSe polymorph is reported, characterized by a distinct atomic configuration with a centrosymmetric monolayer (D-3d point group). The atomic structure of this new GaSe polymorph is determined by aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscopy. Density-functional theory calculations verify the structural stability of this polymorph. Furthermore, the band structure and Raman inten…
Fermi energy dependence of the optical emission in core/shell InAs nanowire homostructures.
2017
InAs nanowires grown by vapor–liquid–solid (VLS) method are investigated by photoluminescence. We observe that the Fermi energy of all samples is reduced by ~20 meV when the size of the Au nanoparticle used for catalysis is increased from 5 to 20 nm. Additional capping with a thin InP shell enhances the optical emission and does not affect the Fermi energy. The unexpected behavior of the Fermi energy is attributed to the differences in the residual donor (likely carbon) incorporation in the axial (low) and lateral (high incorporation) growth in the VLS and vapor–solid (VS) methods, respectively. The different impurity incorporation rate in these two regions leads to a core/shell InAs homost…
Strong Coupling of Coherent Phonons to Excitons in Semiconducting Monolayer MoTe$_2$
2023
The coupling of the electron system to lattice vibrations and their time-dependent control and detection provides unique insight into the non-equilibrium physics of semiconductors. Here, we investigate the ultrafast transient response of semiconducting monolayer 2$H$-MoTe$_2$ encapsulated with $h$BN using broadband optical pump-probe microscopy. The sub-40-fs pump pulse triggers extremely intense and long-lived coherent oscillations in the spectral region of the A' and B' exciton resonances, up to $\sim$20% of the maximum transient signal, due to the displacive excitation of the out-of-plane $A_{1g}$ phonon. Ab-initio calculations reveal a dramatic rearrangement of the optical absorption of…
Electronic structure and optical properties of III-N nanowires
2011
The term III-N nanowire (NW) will refer throughout this work to the free-standing nanowires made of group-III-nitrides semiconductors, namely InN, GaN and AlN. These nanostructures have a large length/diameter ratio, of the order of 100 (sev- eral micrometers versus tenths of nanometers). The term free-standing highlights the fact that the NWs are not embedded in another material. The improvement of the epitaxial techniques, and in particular, those based on III-N semiconductors, has lead an important part of the Solid State Physics community to concentrate the attention in the last years towards a better understanding of the physical properties of those NWs. Nanowires present several di er…