Dr. Silke Diedenhofen

I started in 2016 to work as a FOM/f fellow under supervision of prof. dr. Laurens Siebbeles in the project “Dynamics of Charge Carriers and Excitons in Phosphorene”. Before working at the TU Delft, I studied electrical engineering at the Universität Duisburg-Essen in Germany. After that, I conducted my PhD research within an industrial partnership programme between AMOLF and Philips Research in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. I have defended my PhD thesis “Propagation of Light in Ensembles of Semiconductor Nanowires” in 2010 at Eindhoven University of Technology. In 2011, I moved to ICFO-Institute of Photonic Sciences in Barcelona, Spain, where I worked as a Marie-Curie fellow on plasmonically enhanced quantum dot photodetectors.

My current research focuses on 2D semiconductors such as phosphorene and antimonene and is directed to answer the following questions:

How does the mobility of electrons, holes, and excitons depend on the thickness of the 2D semiconductor? Is quantum confinement resulting in a different mobility as theoretically predicted and which sheet thickness is the optimum for optoelectronic applications?
What is the nature of excited states in 2D semiconductors? Are excitons or free charges generated when they are photoexcited?
How do excitons or charges decay in 2D? Are they recombining radiatively or non-radiatively, or are they trapped at defects? Also, is more than one electron-hole pair generated by excitation with a photon (carrier multiplication)?
Please find out more about me on www.silkediedenhofen.de.