Scientific Achievement
Large-area “in situ” transition-metal substitutional doping via thermal chemical-vapor-deposition of semiconducting transition-metal-dichalcogenide monolayers deposited on dielectric substrates.
Significance and Impact
This work enables stable transition-metal substitution that preserves the monolayer’s semiconducting nature, along with other characteristics, including direct bandgap photoluminescence. Such tuning of functionality achieves one major prerequisite for integration into modern solid-state electronic and optoelectronic technology.
Research Details
- Aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) to analyze the crystal structure and doping
- First principles calculations based on density functional theory to understand the effect of substitutional doping
- A scalable one-pot thermal CVD synthesis approach
J. Gao, Liangbo Liang, Juan Carlos Idrobo, Bobby G. Sumpter et al. Adv. Mater. 28, 9735 (2016).