Visibility of atomically-thin layered materials buried in silicon dioxide

Recently, the coating of thin oxide or nitride film on top of crystals of atomically-thin layered material (ATLM) has been introduced, which benefits optical and electrical properties of the materials and shields them from environmental contact, and has important implications for optoelectronics applications of layered materials. By calculating the reflection contrast, we show the possibility of using an additional oxide film on top of ATLM with good average optical color contrast in broad- and narrow-band wavelength ranges. Our work presents a more comprehensive map of optical color contrast of various ATLMs including graphene, MoS2, MoSe2, WS2, and WSe2 when kept in a sandwich structure between two thin SiO2 films on a Si substrate. The average color contrasts of ATLMs with varying thicknesses of SiO2 films at three different wavelength ranges (i.e. broadband range, range for green filtering and range for red filtering) have been discussed with a summary of optimized thicknesses of the top and bottom oxide films in order to achieve the highest color contrast from the sandwich structures.