Photonic Devices Based On Black-Phosphorus and Combined Hybrid 2D nanomaterials
Artificial semiconductor heterostructures played a pivotal role in modern electronic and photonic technologies, providing a highly effective mean for the manipulation and control of carriers, from the visible to the far-infrared. Despite the exceptional versatility, they commonly require challenging epitaxial growth procedures due to the need of clean and abrupt interfaces, which proved to be a major obstacle for the realization of room-temperature (RT), high-efficiency devices, like source, detectors or modulators. The discovery of graphene and the related fascinating capabilities have triggered an unprecedented interest in devices based on inorganic two-dimensional (2D) materials. Amongst them black-phosphorus (BP) recently showed an extraordinary potential in a variety of applications across micro-electronics and photonics. With an energy gap in-between the gapless graphene and the larger gap transition metal dichalcogenides, BP can form the basis for a new generation of high-performance photonic devices that could be engineered from "scratch" like transparent saturable absorbers, fast photocounductive switch and low noise photodetectors, exploiting its peculiar electrical, thermal and optical anisotropy. This paper will review the latest achievements in black phosphorus-based THz photonics and discuss future perspectives of this rapidly developing research field.