Engineering the electromagnetic environment of a nanometre-scale light emitter by use of a photonic cavity can significantly enhance its spontaneous emission rate, through cavity quantum electrodynamics in the Purcell regime. This effect can greatly reduce the lasing threshold of the emitter, providing a low-threshold laser system with small footprint, low power consumption and ultrafast modulation. An ultralow-threshold nanoscale laser has been successfully developed by embedding quantum dots into a photonic crystal cavity (PCC). However, several challenges impede the practical application of this architecture, including the random positions and compositional fluctuations of the dots, extreme difficulty in current injection, and lack of compatibility with electronic circuits. Here we report a new lasing strategy: an atomically thin crystalline semiconductor--that is, a tungsten diselenide monolayer--is non-destructively and deterministically introduced as a gain medium at the surface of a pre-fabricated PCC. A continuous-wave nanolaser operating in the visible regime is thereby achieved with an optical pumping threshold as low as 27 nanowatts at 130 kelvin, similar to the value achieved in quantum-dot PCC lasers. The key to the lasing action lies in the monolayer nature of the gain medium, which confines direct-gap excitons to within one nanometre of the PCC surface. The surface-gain geometry gives unprecedented accessibility and hence the ability to tailor gain properties via external controls such as electrostatic gating and current injection, enabling electrically pumped operation. Our scheme is scalable and compatible with integrated photonics for on-chip optical communication technologies.

We report on a new chemical sensor based on black phosphorus/molybdenum diselenide van der Waals hetero-junctions. Due to the atomically thin nature of two-dimensional (2D) materials, surface adsorption of gas molecules can effectively modulate the band alignment at the junction interface, making the device a highly sensitive detector for chemical adsorptions. Compared to sensors made of homogeneous nanomaterials, the hetero-junction demonstrates considerably lower detection limit and higher sensitivity toward nitrogen dioxide. Kelvin probe force microscopy and finite element simulations have provided experimental and theoretical explanations for the enhanced performance, proving that chemical adsorption can induce significant changes in band alignment and carrier transport behaviors. The study demonstrates the potential of van der Waals hetero-junction as a new platform for sensing applications, and provides more insights into the interaction between gaseous molecules and 2D hetero-structures.

We report a detailed study on size-dependent capacitance, especially the negative capacitance (NC), in InGaN-based micro-pixelated light-emitting diodes (μLEDs). Similar to conventional broad-area LEDs, μLEDs show NC under large forward bias. In the conventional depletion and diffusion capacitance regimes, a good linear relationship of capacitance with device size is observed. However, the NC under high forward bias shows slight deviation from above-mentioned linear relationship with device size. This behaviour can be understood if the effects of current density and junction temperature on NC are considered. The measured temperature dependence and frequency dispersion of the capacitance underpin this point of view. The NCs of two reference broad-area LEDs were also measured and compared with that of μLED clusters with the same total size. A stronger NC effect is observed in the μLED clusters, which is attributed to the increased number of sidewall defects during fabrication process