Research team uses excitons to take electronics into the future

Excitons could revolutionize the way engineers approach electronics. A team of EPFL researchers has created a new type of transistor—one of the components of circuits—using excitons instead of electrons. Notably, their exciton-based transistor functions effectively at room temperature, a hitherto insurmountable obstacle. They achieved this by using two 2-D materials as semiconductors. Their study, which was published today in Nature, has numerous implications in the field of excitonics, a promising new area of study alongside photonics and spintronics.

"Our research showed that by manipulating excitons, we had come upon a whole new approach to electronics," says Andras Kis, who heads EPFL's Laboratory of Nanoscale Electronics and Structures (LANES). "We are witnessing the emergence of a totally new field of study, the full scope of which we don't yet know."

This breakthrough sets the stage for optoelectronic devices that consume less energy and are both smaller and faster than current devices. In addition, it will be possible to integrate optical transmission and electronic data-processing systems into the same device, which will reduce the number of operations needed and make the systems more efficient.