Energy transfer in free-standing van der Waals heterostructures after optical excitation

The wide range of layered van der Waals materials is interesting due to its plenty of deviating characteristics. The structure of all these materials is built from covalently joined layers, which are stacked by van der Waals forces. Aside from this structural similarity the specific characteristics spread out in a variety of electronic and optical properties. The electronic properties of layered materials vary from pure insulators to metallic conductors and can even depend on the number of layers. In the work presented here, different two-dimensional materials were combined in van der Waals multilayer stacks. The combination of materials with different optical and electronic properties enables to study the dynamics of coupling and transfer mechanisms between the individual materials.