English

Low-Temperature 2D/2D Ohmic Contacts in WSe$_2$ Field-Effect Transistors as a Platform for the 2D Metal-Insulator Transition

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2021-10-25 v1 Disordered Systems and Neural Networks Materials Science Strongly Correlated Electrons

Abstract

We report the fabrication of hexagonal-boron-nitride (hBN) encapsulated multi-terminal WSe2_2 Hall bars with 2D/2D low-temperature Ohmic contacts as a platform for investigating the two-dimensional (2D) metal-insulator transition. We demonstrate that the WSe2_2 devices exhibit Ohmic behavior down to 0.25 K and at low enough excitation voltages to avoid current-heating effects. Additionally, the high-quality hBN-encapsulated WSe2_2 devices in ideal Hall-bar geometry enable us to accurately determine the carrier density. Measurements of the temperature (TT) and density (nsn_s) dependence of the conductivity σ(T,ns)\sigma(T,n_s) demonstrate scaling behavior consistent with a metal-insulator quantum phase transition driven by electron-electron interactions, but where disorder-induced local magnetic moments are also present. Our findings pave the way for further studies of the fundamental quantum mechanical properties of 2D transition metal dichalcogenides using the same contact engineering.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2012.02873,
  title  = {Low-Temperature 2D/2D Ohmic Contacts in WSe$_2$ Field-Effect Transistors as a Platform for the 2D Metal-Insulator Transition},
  author = {L. J. Stanley and Hsun-Jen Chuang and Zhixian Zhou and M. Koehler and J. Yan and D. Mandrus and Dragana Popović},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2012.02873},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

25 pages, 5 figures + Supporting Information (4 pages, 3 figures)