No Arabic abstract
Van der Waals heterostructures such as graphene/MoS$_2$ are promising candidates for plenty of optical or electronic applications, owing to advanced properties inherited from the constitutional atomic layers. Thermal expansion is an important phenomenon to be considered for the thermal stability of the van der Waals heterstructure as temperature commonly rises during the operation of nano devices. In the present work, the thermal expansion coefficient for the graphene/MoS$_2$ heterostructure is investigated by molecular dynamics simulations, and the effect from the unavoidable misfit strain on the thermal expansion coefficient is revealed. The misfit strain can tune the thermal expansion coefficient by a factor of six, and this effect is quite robust in sense that it is not sensitive to the size or direction of the heterostructure. An analytic formula is derived to directly relate the thermal expansion coefficient to the misfit strain of the heterostructure, which qualitatively agrees with the numerical results although the analytic formula underestimates the misfit strain effect. Further analysis discloses that the misfit strain can efficiently engineer the thermal induced ripples, which serves as the key mechanism for the misfit strain effect on the thermal expansion coefficient. These findings provide valuable information for the thermal stability of van der Waals heterostructures and shall be benefit for practical applications of van der Waals heterostructure based nano devices.
The van der Waals coefficients and the separation dependent retardation functions of the interactions between the atomically thin films of the multi-layered transition metal molybdenum disulfide (MoS$_2$) dichalcogenides with the alkali atoms are investigated. First, we determine the frequency-dependent dielectric permittivity and intrinsic carrier density values for different layers of MoS$_2$ by adopting various fitting models to the recently measured optical data reported by Yu and co-workers [Sci. Rep. {bf 5}, 16996 (2015)] using spectroscopy ellipsometry. Then, dynamic electric dipole polarizabilities of the alkali atoms are evaluated very accurately by employing the relativistic coupled-cluster theory. We also demonstrate the explicit change in the above coefficients for different number of layers. These studies are highly useful for the optoelectronics, sensing and storage applications using layered MoS$_2$.
Recent research showed that the rotational degree of freedom in stacking 2D materials yields great changes in the electronic properties. Here we focus on an often overlooked question: are twisted geometries stable and what defines their rotational energy landscape? Our simulations show how epitaxy theory breaks down in these systems and we explain the observed behaviour in terms of an interplay between flexural phonons and the interlayer coupling, governed by Moire superlattice. Our argument applied to the well-studied MoS$_2$/Graphene system rationalize experimental results and could serve as guidance to design twistronics devices.
Van der Waals (vdW) heterobilayers formed by two-dimensional (2D) transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) created a promising platform for various electronic and optical properties. ab initio band results indicate that the band offset of type-II band alignment in TMDCs vdW heterobilayer could be tuned by introducing Janus WSSe monolayer, instead of an external electric field. On the basis of symmetry analysis, the allowed interlayer hopping channels of TMDCs vdW heterobilayer were determined, and a four-level kp model was developed to obtain the interlayer hopping. Results indicate that the interlayer coupling strength could be tuned by interlayer electric polarization featured by various band offsets. Moreover, the difference in the formation mechanism of interlayer valley excitons in different TMDCs vdW heterobilayers with various interlayer hopping strength was also clarified.
Monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDC) grown by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) are plagued by a significantly lower optical quality compared to exfoliated TMDC. In this work we show that the optical quality of CVD-grown MoSe$_2$ is completely recovered if the material is sandwiched in MoS$_2$/MoSe$_2$/MoS$_2$ trilayer van der Waals heterostructures. We show by means of density-functional theory that this remarkable and unexpected result is due to defect healing: S atoms of the more reactive MoS$_2$ layers are donated to heal Se vacancy defects in the middle MoSe$_2$ layer. In addition, the trilayer structure exhibits a considerable charge-transfer mediated valley polarization of MoSe$_2$ without the need for resonant excitation. Our fabrication approach, relying solely on simple flake transfer technique, paves the way for the scalable production of large-area TMDC materials with excellent optical quality.
Graphene exhibits promise as a plasmonic material with high mode confinement that could enable efficient hot carrier extraction. We investigate the lifetimes and mean free paths of energetic carriers in free-standing graphene, graphite and a heterostructure consisting of alternating graphene and hexagonal boron nitride layers using ab initio calculations of electron-electron and electron-phonon scattering in these materials. We find that the extremely high lifetimes (3 ps) of low-energy carriers near the Dirac point in graphene, which are a hundred times larger than that in noble metals, are reduced by an order of magnitude due to inter-layer coupling in graphite, but enhanced in the heterostructure due to phonon mode clamping. However, these lifetimes drop precipitously with increasing carrier energy, and are smaller than those in noble metals at energies exceeding 0.5 eV. By analysing the contribution of different scattering mechanisms and inter-layer interactions, we identify desirable spacer layer characteristics - high dielectric constant and heavy atoms - that could pave the way for plasmonic heterostructures with improved hot carrier transport.