Sub-10 nm continuous metal films are promising candidates for flexible and transparent nanophotonics and optoelectronics applications. In this Letter, we demonstrate that monolayer MoS2 is a perspective adhesion layer for the deposition of continuous conductive gold films with a thickness of only 3-4 nm. Optical properties of continuous ultrathin gold films deposited on two-dimensional MoS2 grown by chemical vapor deposition are investigated by spectroscopic ellipsometry over a wide wavelength range (300-3300 nm). Results show that optical losses in ultrathin films increase with decreasing thickness due to the fine-grained structure and the presence of a small number of voids, however, they exhibit metallic properties down to a thickness of 3-4 nm. The atomic-scale MoS2 interfaces can be transferred to any substrate and thus open up new opportunities for the creation of metasurfaces and a new type of van der Waals heterostructures with atomically thin metal layers.
@article{arxiv.1812.11358,
title = {Ultrathin and ultrasmooth gold films on monolayer MoS2},
author = {Dmitry I. Yakubovsky and Yury V. Stebunov and Roman V. Kirtaev and Georgy A. Ermolaev and Mikhail S. Mironov and Sergey M. Novikov and Aleksey V. Arsenin and Valentyn S. Volkov},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1812.11358},
year = {2019}
}