Molybdenum News Center

A Nano-Optical Look At MoS2 Leads to Surprising Discoveries

Scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory  have used a unique nano-optical probe to study the effects of illumination on two-dimensional semiconductors at the molecular level. The scientific team used the “Campanile” probe they developed to make some surprising discoveries about MoS2, a member of a family of semiconductors, called “transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs), whose optoelectronic properties hold great promise for future nanoelectronic and photonic devices.
“This disordered edge region, which has never been seen before, could be extremely important for any devices in which one wants to make electrical contacts,” Schuck says. “It might also prove critical to photocatalytic and nonlinear optical conversion applications.”
In their new study, Schuck, Bao, Borys and their co-authors used the Campanile probe to spectroscopically map nanoscale excited-state/relaxation processes in monolayer crystals of molybdenum disulfide that were grown by chemical vapor deposition (CVD). Molybdenum disulfide is a 2D semiconductor that features high electrical conductance comparable to that of graphene, but, unlike graphene, has natural energy band-gaps, which means its conductance can be switched off.
Schuck and his colleagues plan to next study the excitonic and electronic properties that may arise, as well as the creation of p-n junctions and quantum wells, when two disparate types of TMDCs are connected.

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