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Graphene's remarkable properties make it ideal for optoelectronic devices, and its two-dimensional nature enables its integration with photonic structures. By combining a graphene transistor with a planar microcavity, Engelet al. control the spectrum of the photocurrent and the light emitted by the device.

The placement of nanomaterials at predefined locations is a key requirement for their integration in nanoelectronic devices. Here, the authors devise a method allowing placement of solution-based nanomaterials by using structured graphene layers as deposition sites with the aid of an electric field.

The contact resistance of a junction between graphene and palladium is shown to be strongly affected by carrier transport in graphene underneath the palladium, and is measured to be just two to three times larger than the minimum resistance achievable.

Researchers clarify damping pathways for mid-infrared graphene plasmons, including graphene intrinsic optical phonons and edge scattering. They also demonstrate the guiding of mid-infrared graphene plasmons in 50-nm-wide structures with an electromagnetic mode area of 10⁻³μm² and a propagation length of 200 nm.

Scientists report that the photovoltaic effect and a photo-induced bolometric effect, rather than thermoelectric effects, dominate the photoresponse during a classic photoconductivity experiment in biased graphene. The findings shed light on the hot-electron-driven photoresponse in graphene and its energy loss pathway via phonons.

Carbon nanotubes and graphene are potential components for nanoscale electronic devices, but power dissipation — a significant issue for high-density electronic circuits — is not fully understood in such materials. Researchers have now mapped the electrically excited phonon populations and the power dissipation pathways in a working carbon nanotube transistor.

Semiconducting carbon nanotubes have a direct bandgap, which means that they could form the basis of nanoscale light sources. However, nanotubes tend to emit light over a broad range of wavelengths and directions. Placing the nanotube in a microcavity reduces the spectral width of the output and makes the emission highly directional. This microcavity-controlled, current-driven on-chip emitter is thus an important first step in the development of nanotube-based nanophotonic devices.

Field-effect transistors made from graphene act as photodetectors at frequencies up to 40 GHz, demonstrating the advantage offered by graphene for photonic applications.

Infrared radiation from biased graphene transistors can be used to extract the temperature distribution, carrier densities and spatial location of the Dirac point in the graphene channel.

Electrically induced light emission from an individual carbon nanotube p–n diode is both more efficient and has a narrower spectrum than previously demonstrated, allowing emission from free and localized excitons to be identified.

An attractive method to fabricate graphene transistors is transferring high-quality graphene sheets to a suitable substrate. This study identifies diamond-like carbon as a new substrate for graphene devices. It is attractive as few sources for scattering are expected at the interface that may lead to deterioration of device properties. Graphene transistors operating at radio frequencies with cutoff as high as 155 GHz and with scalable gate length are demonstrated. Unlike conventional semiconductor devices, the high-frequency performance of the graphene devices exhibits little temperature dependence down to 4.3 K, providing a much larger operation window than conventional devices.

The resonant frequency and magnitude of graphene plasmons in graphene/insulator stacks depend on the layer number, which allows tunable filters and polarizers to be built.

A graphene-based photodetector with unprecedented photoresponsivity and the ability to perform error-free detection of 10 Gbit s⁻¹s data streams is demonstrated. The results suggest that graphene-based photonic devices have a bright future in telecommunications and other optical applications.

The tight confinement of polaritons in 2D materials leads to increased optical losses. Here, the authors demonstrate image phonon polariton modes in hexagonal boron nitride with an antisymmetric charge distribution that feature quality factors of up to 501 and an effective index of 132.

The low mobility measured for molybdenum disulphide layers grown using chemical vapour deposition limits the applications of these promising materials. Here, the authors show that band tail states play an important role on its electronic properties and that the band mobility is significantly higher.

By patterning graphene with sub-wavelength features to introduce plasmonic modes, its optical properties can be tailored. Freitag et al. show how tunable plasmons in graphene nanoribbons can be exploited to form polarization-sensitive graphene photodetectors in the mid-infrared spectral region.

The momentum mismatch between far-field light and acoustic graphene plasmons can be largely overcome by a two-stage coupling scheme for sensitive protein detection in sub-10-nm films.

Carbon nanotubes possess unique properties that make them potentially useful in many applications in optoelectronics. This review describes the fundamental optical behaviour of carbon nanotubes as well as their opportunities for light generation and detection, and photovoltaic energy generation.

In this Perspective, the authors illustrate the physics of hyperbolic polaritons in anisotropic 2D and 1D materials, proposing new potential material candidates, forward looking opportunities and technological applications.

This review presents an overview of scenarios where van der Waals (vdW) materials provide unique advantages for nanophotonic biosensing applications. The authors discuss basic sensing principles based on vdW materials, advantages of the reduced dimensionality as well as technological challenges.

This Review discusses the properties of polariton modes (plasmon, phonon and exciton) in graphene, hexagonal boron nitride and transition metal dichalcogenides for applications across the terahertz to visible spectrum.