Scientists at Rice University and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have advanced on the goal of two-dimensional electronics with a method to control the growth of uniform atomic layers of molybdenum disulfide (MDS).
MDS, a semiconductor, is one of a trilogy of materials needed to make functioning 2-D electronic components. They may someday be the basis for the manufacture of devices so small they would be invisible to the naked eye.
MDS is distinct from graphene and hBN because it isn’t exactly flat. Graphene and hBN are flat, with arrays of hexagons formed by their constituent atoms. But while MDS looks hexagonal when viewed from above, it is actually a stack, with a layer of molybdenum atoms between two layers of sulfur atoms.
Until recently, growing MDS in a usable form has been difficult. The “Scotch tape” method of pulling layers from a bulk sample has been tried, but the resulting materials were inconsistent, Lou said. Early CVD experiments produced MDS with grains that were too tiny to be of use for their electrical properties.
But in the process, the researchers noticed “islands” of MDS tended to form in the furnace where defects or even pieces of dust appeared on the substrate. “The material is difficult to nucleate, unlike hBN or graphene,” Najmaei said. “We started learning that we could control that nucleation by adding artificial edges to the substrate, and now it’s growing a lot better between these structures.”
Once the Ajayan and Lou teams were able to grow such large MDS arrays, the ORNL team imaged the atomic structures using aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscopy. The atomic array can clearly be seen in the images and, more importantly, so can the defects that alter the material’s electronic properties.
The Rice researchers see many possible ways to combine the materials, not only in two-dimensional layers but also as three-dimensional stacks. “Natural crystals are made of structures bound by the van der Waals force, but they’re all of the same composition,” Lou said. “Now we have the opportunity to build 3-D crystals with different compositions.”
This story is reprinted from material from Rice University, with editorial changes made by Materials Today. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily represent those of Elsevier. Link to original source.