Valleytronics, based on the valley degree of freedom rather than charge, is a promising candidate for next-generation information devices beyond complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) technology. Although many intriguing valleytronic properties have been explored based on excitonic injection or the non-local response of transverse current schemes at low temperature, demonstrations of valleytronic building blocks similar to transistors in electronics, especially at room temperature, remain elusive. Here, we report a solid-state device that enables a full sequence of generating, propagating, detecting and manipulating valley information at room temperature. Chiral nanocrescent plasmonic antennae8 are used to selectively generate valley-polarized carriers in MoS2 through hot-electron injection under linearly polarized infrared excitation. These long-lived valley-polarized free carriers can be detected in a valley Hall configuration even without charge current, and can propagate over 18 micron by means of drift. In addition, electrostatic gating allows us to modulate the magnitude of the valley Hall voltage. The electrical valley Hall output could drive the valley manipulation of a cascaded stage, rendering the device able to serve as a transistor free of charge current with pure valleytronic input/output. Our results demonstrate the possibility of encoding and processing information by valley degree of freedom, and provide a universal strategy to study the Berry curvature dipole in quantum materials.
Nature Nanotechnology – Room-temperature valleytronic transistor
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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I don’t get it.
“Gag me with a spoon” sorry, I know, bad joke.
For a material engineer, those terms are familiar, but it’s easy to forget that most people don’t know what a “Brillouin zone” or “crystal momentum” is. Some may have heard of “electronic band structure”, but most don’t have a good understanding of it. Even I don’t remember everything I was taught about it.
Are you nuts?
Maybe my definition of “lay man” needs work?
I’ve found articles on Valleytronics going back to 2016 with talk of making proof of concept devices by 2019, yet no actual articles of anything actually being made.
Berry! Are there berries?
Even that wiki article is hard to decipher. Need to follow the linked keywords to get the necessary background knowledge.
I agree that this article leaps directly into the deep end with no explanation at all about a previously unmentioned field.
As usual, wikipedia has an introduction that makes sense to the layman.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valleytronics
Thaleronics!
But what is it?
… is a terrible name. We need to have students in the STEM learn a little bit of Latin and Greek language again, just enough that people will try to find words like “ankeonics” to describe these techniques. Imagine if photonics got called “lightronics”…