Valleytronics Meets Energy Harvesting

Valleytronics, a new and potentially energy-efficient form of computing hardware, was previously thought to be incompatible with perovskite, a promising energy harvesting semiconductors. Having both functionalities in one single-crystal material is beneficial for monolithically integrated information technology in industrial fabrication. In this work, we identified the necessary atomic lattice symmetry for valleytronics in newly synthesized ultrathin perovskite with nonlinear optical spectroscopy. The finding of entirely different symmetry properties from bulk materials led to the discovery of robust optical valley memory effect, which is surprising at the first glance but understandable from first principle calculation. This collaborative work with Lou group at Rice MSNE and Qian group at TAMU MSE is now published in Advanced Materials. Read more at Rice News.