Ultra-Narrow Linewidth Photo-Emitters in Polymorphic Selenium Nanoflakes

Photoluminescence (PL) in state-of-the-art 2D materials suffers from narrow spectral coverage, relatively broad linewidths, and poor room-temperature (RT) functionality. The authors report ultra-narrow linewidth photo-emitters (ULPs) across the visible to near-infrared wavelength at RT in polymorphic selenium nanoflakes (SeNFs), synthesized via a hot-pressing strategy. Photo-emitters in NIR exhibit full width at half maximum (Gamma) of 330 +/- 90 mu eV, an order of magnitude narrower than the reported ULPs in 2D materials at 300 K, and decrease to 82 +/- 70 mu eV at 100 K, with coherence time (tau(c)) of 21.3 ps. The capping substrate enforced spatial confinement during thermal expansion at 250 degrees C is believed to trigger a localized crystal symmetry breaking in SeNFs, causing a polymorphic transition from the semiconducting trigonal (t) to quasi-metallic orthorhombic (orth) phase. Fine structure splitting in orth-Se causes degeneracy in defect-associated bright excitons, resulting in ultra-sharp emission. Combined theoretical and experimental findings, an optimal biaxial compressive strain of -0.45% cm(-1) in t-Se is uncovered, induced by the coefficient of thermal expansion mismatch at the selenium/sapphire interface, resulting in bandgap widening from 1.74 to 2.23 +/- 0.1 eV. This report underpins the underlying correlation between crystal symmetry breaking induced polymorphism and RT ULPs in SeNFs, and their phase change characteristics.