A Flip-Over Plasmonic Structure for Photoluminescence Enhancement of Encapsulated WS2 Monolayers

Abstract

Transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) monolayers, with their direct band gaps, have attracted wide attention from the fields of photonics and optoelectronics. However, monolayer semiconducting TMDs generally suffer from low excitation absorption and emission efficiency, limiting their further applications. Here a flip-over plasmonic structure comprised of silver nano-disk arrays supporting a WS2 monolayer sandwiched by hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) layers is demonstrated. The flip-over configuration optimizes the optical process with a free excitation/emission path from the top and a strong plasmonic interaction from the bottom. As a result, the photoluminescence from the TMD monolayers can be greatly enhanced more than tenfold by optimizing the metasurface, which can be further improved nearly tenfold by optimizing the thickness of bottom h-BN. This study shows the advantages of using the flip-over structure, where the plasmonic interaction between the metasurface and TMDs can be tuned by introducing optimized plasmonic arrays and h-BN layers with suitable thickness. This hybrid device configuration paves a reliable platform to study the light–matter interaction, achieving highly efficient plasmonic TMD devices.