Abstract
Crystal polymorphism selectively stabilizes the electronic phase of atomically thin transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) as metallic or semiconducting, suggesting the potential to integrate these polymorphs as circuit components in two-dimensional electronic circuitry. Developing a selective and sequential growth strategy for such two-dimensional polymorphs in the vapour phase is a critical step in this endeavour. Here, we report on the polymorphic integration of distinct metallic (1T′) and semiconducting (2H) MoTe2 crystals within the same atomic planes by heteroepitaxy. The realized polymorphic coplanar contact is atomically coherent, and its barrier potential is spatially tight-confined over a length of only a few nanometres, with a lowest contact barrier height of ∼25 meV. We also demonstrate the generality of our synthetic integration approach for other TMDC polymorph films with large areas.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Institute for Basic Science (IBS), Korea, under project code IBS-R014-A1. J.S.K. was also supported by the NRF through the SRC Center for Topological Matter (grant no. 2011-0030046) and the Max Planck POSTECH/KOREA Research Initiative Program (grant no. 2011-0031558).
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M.-H.J. and H.H. conceived and designed the project. S.S., H.H. and C.-S.L. synthesized MoTe2 polymorphs and carried out the AFM and Raman scattering characterizations. J.H.S., Y.H.K., J.K., S.-Y.S. and D.-H.K. performed device fabrication and electrical characterization. H.R.N., H.K.K. and H.W.Y. performed STM measurements. K.S. and S.-Y.C. acquired STEM images and analysed the data. M.-H.J., J.S.K., T.-H.K., S.-Y.C., J.H.S. and H.H. co-wrote the paper. All the authors discussed the results and commented on the manuscript.
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Sung, J., Heo, H., Si, S. et al. Coplanar semiconductor–metal circuitry defined on few-layer MoTe2 via polymorphic heteroepitaxy. Nature Nanotech 12, 1064–1070 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2017.161
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2017.161
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