Perfect absorption for monolayer transition-metal dichalcogenides by critical coupling.

Due to the inherent atomical size, transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) have a weak coupling with free-space light and exhibit poor optical absorption, which restricts some practical applications. Exploring an effective way to boost their absorption is important and highly desired. In this work, based on the temporal coupled-mode theory, a generic guide to approach 100% absorption of an absorber is presented. From such a theory, the perfect absorption of TMDCs integrated with dielectric photonic structure is both theoretically and numerically demonstrated. This proposed structure has advantageous tunability at the wavelengths of interest by adjusting structure parameters. Moreover, the angular dependence of the light absorption of such a structure for different polarizations is also investigated. The present work of boosting light absorption would be particularly favorable for applications in advanced photodetectors and modulators.