Heterostructure materials form the basis of much of modern electronics, from transistors to lasers and light-emitting diodes. Recent years have seen a renewed focus on creating heterostructures through the vertical integration of two-dimensional materials, including graphene, hexagonal boron nitride, and transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs). However, fundamental challenges associated with materials processing have limited material quality and impeded scalability. We demonstrate a method to convert sub-nanometer metal films deposited on silicon and sapphire into TMDC heterostructures through vapor-phase processing. The resulting heterostructures and superlattices exhibit novel properties compared with stand-alone TMDCs, including reduced bandgap, enhanced light-matter coupling, and improved catalytic performance. This robust and scalable synthetic method provides new opportunities to generate a wide range of artificially stacked 2D superlattices with controlled morphology and composition.
@article{arxiv.2111.02864,
title = {Scalable synthesis of 2D van der Waals superlattices},
author = {Michael J. Motala and Xiang Zhang and Pawan Kumar and Eliezer F. Oliveira and Anna Benton and Paige Miesle and Rahul Rao and Peter R. Stevenson and David Moore and Adam Alfieri and Jason Lynch and Guanhui Gao and Sijie Ma and Hanyu Zhu and Zhe Wang and Ivan Petrov and Eric A. Stach and W. Joshua Kennedy and Shiva Vengala and James M. Tour and Douglas S. Galvao and Deep Jariwala and Christopher Muratore and Michael Snure and Pulickel M. Ajayan and Nicholas R. Glavin},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.02864},
year = {2021}
}