Strain- and twist-engineered optical absorption of few-layer black phosphorus

Density functional and many-body perturbation theories calculations were carried out to investigate fundamental and optical bandgap, exciton binding energy and optical absorption property of normal and strain- and twist-engineered few-layer black phosphorus (BP). We found that the fundamental bandgaps of few layer BP can be engineered by layer stacking and in-plane strain, with linear relationships to their associated exciton binding energies. The strain-dependent optical absorption behaviors are also anisotropic that the position of the first absorption peak monotonically blue-shifts as the strain applies to either direction for incident light polarized along the armchair direction, but this is not the case for that along the zigzag direction. Given those striking properties, we proposed two prototype devices for building potentially more balanced light absorbers and light filter passes, which promotes further applications and investigations of BP in nanoelectronics and optoelectronics.