Van der Waals heterostructures have emerged as an ideal platform for creating engineered artificial electronic states. While vertical heterostructures have been extensively studied, realizing high-quality lateral heterostructures with atomically sharp interfaces remains a major experimental challenge. Here, we advance a one-pot two-step molecular beam lateral epitaxy approach and successfully synthesize atomically well-defined 1T-VSe2 -- 1H-NbSe2 lateral heterostructures. We demonstrate the formation of defect-free lateral heterostructures and characterize their electronic structure using scanning tunnelling microscopy and spectroscopy together with density functional theory calculations. We find additional electronic states at the one-dimensional interface as well as signatures of Kondo resonances in a side-coupled geometry. Our experiments explore the full potential of lateral heterostructures for realizing exotic electronic states in low-dimensional systems for further studies of artificial designer quantum materials.
@article{arxiv.2405.17231,
title = {Atomically sharp 1D interfaces in 2D lateral heterostructures of VSe$_2$-NbSe$_2$ monolayers},
author = {Xin Huang and Héctor González-Herrero and Orlando J. Silveira and Shawulienu Kezilebieke and Peter Liljeroth and Jani Sainio},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.17231},
year = {2024}
}