Material engineers usually strive for perfection in the material composition and shape. However, nature is not always perfect, and many useful material properties originate from defects in the structure rather than from perfect periodicity and symmetry of materials. In a just-published Advanced Optical Materials manuscript, Abhishek Mukherjee and co-authors show how one can harness these imperfections to tune and enhance photoluminescence from AgScP2S6 – a new layered semiconductor material recently synthesized in the Air Force Research Lab.

Recent experiments conducted at Dr. Svetlana Boriskina’s MIT-META research lab, MIT.nano, ISN, and the Institute of Physics in Warsaw reveal that nano-scale sulfur vacancies in AgScP2S6 allow defect-state-to-valence-band transitions leading to visible light emission, while micro-scale structural defects in the material can enhance and modulate the photoluminescence intensity and shape its spectrum.

Read the paper in Advanced Optical Materials

MIT.nano is thrilled to announce the 2024 Mildred S. Dresselhaus Lecturer: Clare Grey!

Clare P. Grey, DBE, FRS is a Royal Society Research Professor and the Geoffrey Moorhouse-Gibson Professor of Chemistry at Cambridge University.

MIT physicists and colleagues have created a new material with unusual superconducting and metallic properties thanks to wavy layers of atoms only billionths of a meter thick that repeat themselves over and over to create a macroscopic sample that can be manipulated by hand. The large size of the sample makes it much easier to explore its quantum behavior, or interactions at the atomic scale that give rise to its properties.

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