International. An international research team has developed inks made from graphene-like materials that are compatible with conventional inkjet printing techniques for optoelectronics and photonics.
Since the discovery of the Nobel Prize-winning graphene material, many new nanomaterials promise to offer exciting new photonic and optoelectronic technologies.
Black phosphorus is a particularly interesting post-graphene nanomaterial for state-of-the-art photonic and optoelectronic devices. However, despite remarkable performance in the laboratory, the practical real-world exploitation of this material has been hampered by the manufacture of complex materials and their poor environmental stability. "Our inkjet printing demonstration makes possible for the first time the scalable mass fabrication of black phosphorus-based photonic and optoelectronic devices with the long-term stability needed for a wide range of industrial applications," explains Professor Zhipei Sun at Aalto University in Finland.
The scientists optimized the chemical composition to achieve a stable ink through the balance of complex and competitive fluidic effects. This enabled the production of new photonic and optoelectronic functional devices by inkjet with excellent print quality and uniformity, as well as the printing of intricate graphics or photographs on paper. The researchers' work demonstrated the benefits of their novel technique using inkjet printing devices that take advantage of the properties of black phosphorus, among other things, its semiconductor band that can be easily varied by designing the number of atomic layers and covering the visible and nearby infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum.
The researchers also demonstrated printed black phosphor-based nonlinear optical devices that can be easily inserted into laser beams to act as ultra-fast optical blinds, turning a continuous beam of laser radiation into a repetitive series of very short bursts of light suitable for industrial and medical applications, such as machining, imaging, and sensing. In the study, black phosphorus was also able to act as an effective and highly sensitive light detector, extending the wavelength range over which conventional silicon-based photodetectors can operate.
Importantly, the researchers demonstrated that phosphorus black ink can be seamlessly integrated with existing metal oxide complement and semiconductor (CMOS) technologies, while the inkjet technique developed the possibility of supporting the manufacture of so-called heterostructured materials that seek to capitalize on the benefits of the various properties, although complementary, of multiple layers of nanomaterials through controlled manufacturing.
The new ink was developed by an interdisciplinary team of international researchers at Aalto University, the University of Cambridge (UK), Imperial College London (UK) and Beihang University (China). The research was supported by the Finnish Academy, Tekes, the Finnish Innovation Finance Agency, the Nokia Foundation and the European Commission.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-00358-1
