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Shallowing interfacial carrier trap in transition metal dichalcogenide heterostructures with interlayer hybridization

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Abstract

With the unique properties, layered transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) and its heterostructures exhibit great potential for applications in electronics. The electrical performance, e.g., contact barrier and resistance to electrodes, of TMD heterostructure devices can be significantly tailored by employing the functional layers, called interlayer engineering. At the interface between different TMD layers, the dangling-bond states normally exist and act as traps against charge carrier flow. In this study, we propose a technique to suppress such carrier trap that uses enhanced interlayer hybridization to saturate dangling-bond states, as demonstrated in a strongly interlayer-coupled monolayer-bilayer PtSe2 heterostructure. The hybridization between the unsaturated states and the interlayer electronic states of PtSe2 significantly reduces the depth of carrier traps at the interface, as corroborated by our scanning tunnelling spectroscopic measurements and density functional theory calculations. The suppressed interfacial trap demonstrates that interlayer saturation may offer an efficient way to relay the charge flow at the interface of TMD heterostructures. Thus, this technique provides an effective way for optimizing the interface contact, the crucial issue exists in two-dimensional electronic community.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledged the financial support from the Beijing Natural Science Foundation (Nos. Z190006 and 4192054), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 61725107, 11622437, 61674171, 11974422, 61761166009, and 61888102), the National Key Research & Development Projects of China (Nos. 2016YFA0202301, 2019YFA0308000, and 2018YFE0202700), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, China and the Research Funds of Renmin University of China (Nos. 16XNLQ01 and 19XNQ025), and the Strategic Priority Research Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Nos. XDB30000000 and XDB28000000). Calculations were performed at the Physics Lab of High-Performance Computing of Renmin University of China and Shanghai Supercomputer Center.

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  1. Xu Wu, Jingsi Qiao, and Liwei Liu contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information and Electronics, MIIT Key Laboratory for Low-Dimensional Quantum Structure and Devices, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, 100081, China

    Xu Wu, Liwei Liu & Yeliang Wang

  2. Institute of Physics & University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China

    Xu Wu, Yan Shao, Zhongliu Liu, Linfei Li, Zhili Zhu, Yeliang Wang & Hongjun Gao

  3. Beijing Key Laboratory of Optoelectronic Functional Materials & Micro-Nano Devices, Department of Physics, Renmin University of China, Beijing, 100872, China

    Jingsi Qiao, Cong Wang & Wei Ji

  4. Center for Joint Quantum Studies and Department of Physics, Tianjin University, Tianjin, 300350, China

    Zhixin Hu

  5. CAS Center for Excellence in Topological Quantum Computation, Beijing, 100049, China

    Yeliang Wang & Hongjun Gao

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  1. Xu Wu
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  2. Jingsi Qiao
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Correspondence to Wei Ji or Yeliang Wang.

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Wu, X., Qiao, J., Liu, L. et al. Shallowing interfacial carrier trap in transition metal dichalcogenide heterostructures with interlayer hybridization. Nano Res. 14, 1390–1396 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-020-3188-8

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