One of the current challenges in photonics is developing high-speed, power-efficient, chip-integrated optical communications devices to address the interconnects bottleneck in high-speed computing systems. Silicon photonics has emerged as a leading architecture, in part because of the promise that many components, such as waveguides, couplers, interferometers and modulators, could be directly integrated on silicon-based processors. However, light sources and photodetectors present ongoing challenges. Common approaches for light sources include one or few off-chip or wafer-bonded lasers based on III-V materials, but recent system architecture studies show advantages for the use of many directly modulated light sources positioned at the transmitter location. The most advanced photodetectors in the silicon photonic process are based on germanium, but this requires additional germanium growth, which increases the system cost. The emerging two-dimensional transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) offer a path for optical interconnect components that can be integrated with silicon photonics and complementary metal-oxide-semiconductors (CMOS) processing by back-end-of-the-line steps. Here, we demonstrate a silicon waveguide-integrated light source and photodetector based on a p-n junction of bilayer MoTe, a TMD semiconductor with an infrared bandgap. This state-of-the-art fabrication technology provides new opportunities for integrated optoelectronic systems.

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Diverse parallel stitched 2D heterostructures, including metal-semiconductor, semiconductor-semiconductor, and insulator-semiconductor, are synthesized directly through selective "sowing" of aromatic molecules as the seeds in the chemical vapor deposition (CVD) method. The methodology enables the large-scale fabrication of lateral heterostructures, which offers tremendous potential for its application in integrated circuits.

Ultrafast-response (20 μs) UV detectors, which are visible-blind and self-powered, in devices where an n-type ZnO nanowire partially lies on a p-type GaN film, are demonstrated. Moreover, a CdSe-nanowire red-light detector powered by a nanoscale ZnO/GaN photovoltaic cell is also demonstrated, which extends the device function to a selective multiwavelength photodetector and shows the function of an optical logical AND gate.

When electrons in a solid are excited with light, they can alter the free energy landscape and access phases of matter that are beyond reach in thermal equilibrium. This accessibility becomes of vast importance in the presence of phase competition, when one state of matter is preferred over another by only a small energy scale that, in principle, is surmountable by light. Here, we study a layered compound, LaTe3, where a small in-plane (a-c plane) lattice anisotropy results in a unidirectional charge density wave (CDW) along the c-axis. Using ultrafast electron diffraction, we find that after photoexcitation, the CDW along the c-axis is weakened and subsequently, a different competing CDW along the a-axis emerges. The timescales characterizing the relaxation of this new CDW and the reestablishment of the original CDW are nearly identical, which points towards a strong competition between the two orders. The new density wave represents a transient non-equilibrium phase of matter with no equilibrium counterpart, and this study thus provides a framework for unleashing similar states of matter that are "trapped" under equilibrium conditions.