Ultrathin lateral heterostructures of monolayer MoS2 and WS2 have successfully been realized with the metal-organic chemical vapor deposition method. Atomic-resolution HAADF-STEM observations have revealed that the junction widths of lateral heterostructures range from several nanometers to single-atom thickness, the thinnest heterojunction in theory. The interfaces are atomically flat with minimal mixing between MoS2 and WS2, originating from rapid and abrupt switching of the source supply. Due to one-dimensional interfaces and broken rotational symmetry, the resulting ultrathin lateral heterostructures, 1~2 mixed-dimensional structures, can show emergent optical/electronic properties. The MOCVD growth developed in this work allows us to access various ultrathin lateral heterostructures, leading to future exploration of their emergent properties absent in each component alone.
@article{arxiv.2208.12696,
title = {Two-dimensional atomic-scale ultrathin lateral heterostructures},
author = {Nanami Ichinose and Mina Maruyama and Takato Hotta and Zheng Liu and Ruben Canton-Vitoria and Susumu Okada and Fanyu Zeng and Feng Zhang and Takashi Taniguchi and Kenji Watanabe and Ryo Kitaura},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2208.12696},
year = {2025}
}