Pierluigi Cudazzo

Dielectric screening in two-dimensional insulators: Implications for excitonic and impurity states in graphane

For atomic thin layer insulating materials we provide an exact analytic form of the two-dimensional (2D) screened potential. In contrast to three-dimensional systems where the macroscopic screening can be described by a static dielectric constant, in 2D systems the macroscopic screening is nonlocal (

Phonon softening and direct to indirect band gap crossover in strained single-layer MoSe2

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Strong Charge-Transfer Excitonic Effects and the Bose-Einstein Exciton Condensate in Graphane

dependent) showing a logarithmic divergence for small distances and reaching the unscreened Coulomb potential for large distances. The crossover of these two regimes is dictated by 2D layer polarizability that can be easily computed by standard first-principles techniques. The present results have strong implications for describing gap-impurity levels and also exciton binding energies. The simple model derived here captures the main physical effects and reproduces well, for the case of graphane, the full many-body

Instantaneous Band Gap Collapse in Photoexcited Monoclinic VO2 due to Photocarrier Doping

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Electronic properties of molecular solids: the peculiar case of solid picene

plus Bethe-Salpeter calculations. As an additional outcome we show that the impurity hole-doping in graphane leads to strongly localized states, which hampers applications in electronic devices. In spite of the inefficient and nonlocal two-dimensional macroscopic screening we demonstrate that a simple

Exciton dispersion in molecular solids

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Superconducting pairing mediated by spin fluctuations from first principles

approach is capable to describe the electronic and transport properties of confined 2D systems.

Loss spectroscopy of molecular solids: combining experiment and theory

This work was supported by the Flemish Science Foundation (FWO-Vl) and the Methusalem programme of the Flemish government. Computational resources were partially provided by TUBITAK ULAKBIM, High Performance and Grid Computing Center (TR-Grid e-Infrastructure). H.S. is supported by a FWO Pegasus Marie Curie Long Fellowship.

Local-field effects on the plasmon dispersion of two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenides

Using first principles many-body theory methods (GW+Bethe-Salpeter equation) we demonstrate that the optical properties of graphane are dominated by localized charge-transfer excitations governed by enhanced electron correlations in a two-dimensional dielectric medium. Strong electron-hole interaction leads to the appearance of small radius bound excitons with spatially separated electron and hole, which are localized out of plane and in plane, respectively. The presence of such bound excitons opens the path towards an excitonic Bose-Einstein condensate in graphane that can be observed experimentally.

Excitons in van der Waals materials: From monolayer to bulk hexagonal boron nitride

Using femtosecond time-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy we demonstrate that photoexcitation transforms monoclinic VO2 quasi-instantaneously into a metal. Thereby, we exclude an 80 fs structural bottleneck for the photoinduced electronic phase transition of VO2. First-principles many-body perturbation theory calculations reveal a high sensitivity of the VO2 band gap to variations of the dynamically screened Coulomb interaction, supporting a fully electronically driven isostructural insulator-to-metal transition. We thus conclude that the ultrafast band structure renormalization is caused by photoexcitation of carriers from localized V 3d valence states, strongly changing the screening before significant hot-carrier relaxation or ionic motion has occurred.