No Arabic abstract
Motivated by recent advances on local conductance measurement techniques at the nanoscale, timely questions are being raised about what possible information can be extracted from a disordered material by selectively interrogating its transport properties. Here we demonstrate how an inversion technique originally developed to identify the number of scatterers in a quantum device can be adapted to a multi-terminal setup in order to provide detailed information about the spatial distribution of impurities on the surface of a 2D material. The methodology input are conductance readings (for instance, as a function of the chemical potential) between different electrode pairs, the output being the spatially resolved impurity density. We show that the obtained spatial resolution depends not only on the number of conductance measurements but also on the electrode dimensions. Furthermore, when implemented with electrodes in a grid-like geometry, this inversion procedure resembles a Sudoku puzzle in which the compositions of different sectors of a device are found by imposing that they must add up to specific constrained values established for the grid rows and columns. We argue that this technique may be used with other quantities besides the conductance, paving the way to alternative new ways of extracting information from a disordered material through the selective probing of local quantities.
In situ electron microscopy is a key tool for understanding the mechanisms driving novel phenomena in 2D structures. Unfortunately, due to various practical challenges, technologically relevant 2D heterostructures prove challenging to address with electron microscopy. Here, we use the differential phase contrast imaging technique to build a methodology for probing local electrostatic fields during electrical operation with nanoscale precision in such materials. We find that by combining a traditional DPC setup with a high pass filter, we can largely eliminate electric fluctuations emanating from short-range atomic potentials. With this method, a priori electric field expectations can be directly compared with experimentally derived values to readily identify inhomogeneities and potentially problematic regions. We use this platform to analyze the electric field and charge density distribution across layers of hBN and MoS2.
A method was developed to calculate the free energy of 2D materials on substrates and was demonstrated by the system of graphene and {gamma}-graphyne on copper substrate. The method works at least 3 orders faster than state-of-the-art algorithms, and the accuracy was tested by molecular dynamics simulations, showing that the precision for calculations of the internal energy achieves up to 0.03% in a temperature range from 100 to 1300K. As expected, the calculated the free energy of a graphene sheet on Cu (111) or Ni (111) surface in a temperature range up to 3000K is always smaller than the one of a {gamma}-graphyne sheet with the same number of C atoms, which is consistent with the fact that growth of graphene on the substrates is much easier than {gamma}-graphyne.
The C2DB is a highly curated open database organizing a wealth of computed properties for more than 4000 atomically thin two-dimensional (2D) materials. Here we report on new materials and properties that were added to the database since its first release in 2018. The set of new materials comprise several hundred monolayers exfoliated from experimentally known layered bulk materials, (homo)bilayers in various stacking configurations, native point defects in semiconducting monolayers, and chalcogen/halogen Janus monolayers. The new properties include exfoliation energies, Bader charges, spontaneous polarisations, Born charges, infrared polarisabilities, piezoelectric tensors, band topology invariants, exchange couplings, Raman- and second harmonic generation spectra. We also describe refinements of the employed material classification schemes, upgrades of the computational methodologies used for property evaluations, as well as significant enhancements of the data documentation and provenance. Finally, we explore the performance of Gaussian process-based regression for efficient prediction of mechanical and electronic materials properties. The combination of open access, detailed documentation, and extremely rich materials property data sets make the C2DB a unique resource that will advance the science of atomically thin materials.
Raman spectroscopy is one of the most extended experimental techniques to investigate thin-layered 2D materials. For a complete understanding and modeling of the Raman spectrum of a novel 2D material, it is often necessary to combine the experimental investigation to density-functional-theory calculations. We provide the experimental proof of the fundamentally different behavior of polar 2D vs 3D systems regarding the effect of the dipole-dipole interactions, which in 2D systems ultimately lead to the absence of optical phonons splitting, otherwise present in 3D materials. We demonstrate that non-analytical corrections (NACs) should not be applied to properly model the Raman spectra of few-layered 2D materials, such as WSe$_{2}$ and h-BN, corroborating recent theoretical predictions [Nano Lett. 2017, 17 (6), 3758-3763]. Our findings are supported by measurements performed on tilted samples that allow increasing the component of photon momenta in the plane of the flake, thus unambiguously setting the direction of an eventual NAC. We also investigate the influence of the parity of the number of layers and of the type of layer-by-layer stacking on the effect of NACs on the Raman spectra.
Low-resistivity metal-semiconductor (M-S) contact is one of the urgent challenges in the research of 2D transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs). Here, we report a chloride molecular doping technique which greatly reduces the contact resistance (Rc) in the few-layer WS2 and MoS2. After doping, the Rc of WS2 and MoS2 have been decreased to 0.7 kohm*um and 0.5 kohm*um, respectively. The significant reduction of the Rc is attributed to the achieved high electron doping density thus significant reduction of Schottky barrier width. As a proof-ofconcept, high-performance few-layer WS2 field-effect transistors (FETs) are demonstrated, exhibiting a high drain current of 380 uA/um, an on/off ratio of 4*106, and a peak field-effect mobility of 60 cm2/V*s. This doping technique provides a highly viable route to diminish the Rc in TMDs, paving the way for high-performance 2D nano-electronic devices.