Hybrid LED Could Power Li-Fi, Electrically Driven Lasers

A City College of New York (CUNY) research team has demonstrated an LED based on half-light, half-matter quasiparticles in atomically thin materials. The device was fabricated using stacks of atomically thin semiconductor materials embedded in an optical cavity. The electrically driven polariton LED operates at room temperature using monolayer tungsten disulfide (WS2) as the emissive material. The polariton LED demonstrated an extracted external quantum efficiency of about 0.1%. According to the researchers, this number is comparable to recent demonstrations of bulk organic and carbon nanotube-based polariton electroluminescence devices. Schematic of a half-light, half-matter quasiparticle-based LED developed using atomically...