Additive manufacturing has provided a pathway for inexpensive

Heterophase homojunction formation in atomically thin 2D layers is of great importance for next-generation nanoelectronics and optoelectronics applications. Technologically challenging, controllable transformation between the semiconducting and metallic phases of transition metal chalcogenides is of particular importance. Here, we demonstrate that controlled laser irradiation can be used to directly ablate PdSe2 thin films using high power, or trigger the local transformation of PdSe2 into a metallic phase PdSe2-x using lower laser power. Such transformations are possible due to the low decomposition temperature of PdSe2 compared to other 2D transition metal dichalcogenides. Scanning transmission electron microscopy is used to reveal the laser-induced Se-deficient phases of PdSe2 material. The process sensitivity to the laser power allows patterning flexibility for resist free device fabrication. The laser patterned devices demonstrate that a laser-induced metallic phase PdSe2-x is stable with increased conductivity by a factor of about 20 compared to PdSe2. These findings contribute to 2 the development of nanoscale devices with homojunctions and scalable methods to achieve structural transformations in 2D materials.

Tin disulfide crystals with layered two-dimensional (2D) sheets are grown by chemical vapor deposition using a novel precursor approach and integrated into all 2D transistors with graphene (Gr) electrodes. The Gr:SnS:Gr transistors exhibit excellent photodetector response with high detectivity and photoresponsivity. We show that the response of the all 2D photodetectors depends upon charge trapping at the interface and the Schottky barrier modulation. The thickness-dependent SnS measurements in devices reveal a transition from the interface-dominated response for thin crystals to bulklike response for the thicker SnS crystals, showing the sensitivity of devices fabricated using layered materials on the number of layers. These results show that SnS has photosensing performance when combined with Gr electrodes that is comparable to other 2D transition metal dichalcogenides of MoS and WS.

Two-dimensional gallium sulfide (GaS) crystals are synthesized by a simple and efficient ambient pressure chemical vapor deposition (CVD) method using a single-source precursor of Ga2S3. The synthesized GaS structures involve triangular monolayer domains and multilayer flakes with thickness of 1 and 15 nm, respectively. Regions of continuous films of GaS are also achieved with about 0.7 cm2 uniform coverage. This is achieved by using hydrogen carrier gas and the horizontally placed SiO2/Si substrates. Electron microscopy and spectroscopic measurements are used to characteristic the CVD-grown materials. This provides important insights into novel approaches for enlarging the domain size of GaS crystals and understanding of the growth mechanism using this precursor system.

Two-dimensional materials are being increasingly studied, particularly for flexible and wearable technologies because of their inherent thickness and flexibility. Crucially, one aspect where our understanding is still limited is on the effect of mechanical strain, not on individual sheets of materials, but when stacked together as heterostructures in devices. In this paper, we demonstrate the use of Kelvin probe microscopy in capturing the influence of uniaxial tensile strain on the band-structures of graphene and WS (mono- and multilayered) based heterostructures at high resolution. We report a major advance in strain characterization tools through enabling a single-shot capture of strain defined changes in a heterogeneous system at the nanoscale, overcoming the limitations (materials, resolution, and substrate effects) of existing techniques such as optical spectroscopy. Using this technique, we observe that the work-functions of graphene and WS increase as a function of strain, which we attribute to the Fermi level lowering from increased p-doping. We also extract the nature of the interfacial heterojunctions and find that they get strongly modulated from strain. We observe that the strain-enhanced charge transfer with the substrate plays a dominant role, causing the heterostructures to behave differently from two-dimensional materials in their isolated forms.