By plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition, a molybdenum disulfide (MoS2 ) thin film is synthesized directly on a wafer-scale plastic substrate at below 300 °C. The carrier mobility of the films is 3.74 cm(2) V(-1) s(-1) . Also, humidity is successfully detected with MoS2 -based sensors fabricated on the flexible substrate, which reveals its potential for flexible sensing devices.

Atomically thin binary two-dimensional (2D) semiconductors exhibit diverse physical properties depending on their composition, structure, and thickness. By adding another element in these materials, which will lead to formation of ternary 2D materials, the property and structure would greatly change and significantly expanded applications could be explored. In this work, we report structural and optical properties of atomically thin chromium thiophosphate (CrPS), a ternary antiferromagnetic semiconductor. Its structural details were revealed by X-ray and electron diffraction. Transmission electron microscopy showed that preferentially cleaved edges are parallel to diagonal Cr atom rows, which readily identified their crystallographic orientations. Strong in-plane optical anisotropy induced birefringence that also enabled efficient determination of crystallographic orientation using polarized microscopy. The lattice vibrations were probed by Raman spectroscopy and exhibited significant dependence on thickness of crystals exfoliated down to a single layer. Optical absorption determined by reflectance contrast was dominated by d-d-type transitions localized at Cr ions, which was also responsible for the major photoluminescence peak at 1.31 eV. The spectral features in the absorption and emission spectra exhibited noticeable thickness dependence and hinted at a high photochemical activity for single-layer CrPS. The current structural and optical investigation will provide a firm basis for future study and application of this kind of atomically thin magnetic semiconductors.

We describe a method for synthesizing large-area and uniform molybdenum disulfide films, with control over the layer number, on insulating substrates using a gas phase sulfuric precursor (H2S) and a molybdenum metal source. The metal layer thickness was varied to effectively control the number of layers (2 to 12) present in the synthesized film. The films were grown on wafer-scale Si/SiO2 or quartz substrates and displayed excellent uniformity and a high crystallinity over the entire area. Thin film transistors were prepared using these materials, and the performances of the devices were tested. The devices displayed an on/off current ratio of 10(5), a mobility of 0.12 cm(2) V(-1) s(-1) (mean mobility value of 0.07 cm(2) V(-1) s(-1)), and reliable operation.

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Monolayer MoS2 nanosheets are potentially useful in optoelectronics, photoelectronics, and nanoelectronics due to their flexibility, mechanical strength, and direct band gap of 1.89 eV. Experimentalists have studied the synthesis of MoS2 using chemical vapor deposition (CVD) methods in an effort to fabricate wafer-scale nanofilms with a high uniformity and continuity for practical electronic applications. In this work, we applied the CVD method to a reaction of MoO3 powder and H2S gas to grow high-quality polycrystalline monolayer MoS2 sheets with unprecedented uniformity over an area of several centimeters. The monolayer MoS2 was characterized using Raman spectroscopy, photoluminescence (PL) spectroscopy, atomic force microscopy (AFM), x-ray photoemission spectroscopy (XPS), and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The top-gate field-effect transistor prepared with a 30 nm HfO2 capping layer displayed an electrical mobility of 1 cm(2) v(-1) s(-1) and an I on/off of ~10(5). This method paves the way for the development of practical devices with MoS2 monolayers and advances fundamental research.