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Molybdenum Ditelluride: Better Than Two-Dimensional Silicon

Molybdenum ditelluride has developed by Korean and Japanese research team and it is a new semiconductor material. They claimed that this material can be used in electronic products in the future as alternate of silicon. Science reported on August 7th about this new transistor, its pipeline comprising one called molybdenum ditelluride (MoTe2) of two-dimensional material.

Although silicon is very important, but all scientists are looking for alternatives to replace silicon, because it has two drawbacks: when the silicon coating is changed to only one or a few atoms in thickness, and its electronic properties will decline, and its indirect bandgap makes it difficult to apply photovoltaic project.

Researchers are testing called metal dichacogenides transistor alternative materials, including molybdenum disulfide and tungsten diselenide. But how to make these materials when contacte with metals will have good electrical conductivity is still a big problem. Molybdenum ditelluride early in the 1960s have been synthesized, but has not taken seriously because it can not be use in electronic devices with simply form. But last year Yang and his colleagues extracted high purity molybdenum ditelluride and have some surprising discovery.

This prototype transistor has about 2 microns semiconductor channel of molybdenum ditelluride. At both ends of the channel, the surface of the semiconductor after laser radiation will be transformed into metal phase. "Once our material into a metallic state, we can put gold or aluminum connector, which is good for high-speed device." Yang said. The transistor power and pipe joints not actually outside the channel material, but the material itself part - a very novel two-dimensional transistor design. "This is the first time using the same two-dimensional material to achieve the metal-semiconductor tip", Yang said. The homojunction between two phases has high efficiency, in which electrons can be moved quickly - about 10 to 50 times than silicon.

Another advantage of molybdenum ditelluride semiconductor material is it has almost the same energy band gap of silicon--1eV of molybdenum ditelluride probably quite equal to 1.1eV of silicon. This similarity could help molybdenum ditelluride transistor replace silicon during logic circuit designation.

Yang's next step is to make a single layer prototype transistor channel. But it does not seem so easy to make a single layer structure in molybdenum ditelluride. Different with exfoliated graphite can simply create different single atomic layer of graphene, molybdenum telluride must use another additional programs. "Interaction between the graphene layer films is very weak. Unfortunately, the interaction between molybdenum ditelluride is great. However, in all two-dimensional semiconductor, titanium and molybdenum telluride it is worth a greater effort to study. "Compared with other two-dimensional semiconductor, such a low bandgap is worth people expected." Yang said.

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