A detailed understanding of charged defects in two-dimensional semiconductors is needed for the development of ultrathin electronic devices. Here, we study negatively charged acceptor impurities in monolayer WS2 using a combination of scanning tunnelling spectroscopy and large-scale atomistic electronic structure calculations. We observe several localized defect states of hydrogenic wave function character in the vicinity of the valence band edge. Some of these defect states are bound, while others are resonant. The resonant states result from the multi-valley valence band structure of WS2, whereby localized states originating from the secondary valence band maximum at Γ hybridize with continuum states from the primary valence band maximum at K/K . Resonant states have important consequences for electron transport as they can trap mobile carriers for several tens of picoseconds.

Defect engineering is a promising route for controlling the electronic properties of monolayer transition-metal dichalcogenide (TMD) materials. Here, we demonstrate that the electronic structure of MoS2 depends sensitively on the defect charge, both its sign and magnitude. In particular, we study shallow bound states induced by charged defects using large-scale tight-binding simulations with screened defect potentials and observe qualitative changes in the orbital character of the lowest lying impurity states as function of the impurity charge. To gain further insights, we analyze the competition of impurity states originating from different valleys of the TMD band structure using effective mass theory and find that impurity state binding energies are controlled by the effective mass of the corresponding valley, but with significant deviations from hydrogenic behaviour due to unconventional screening of the defect potential.

Nominally pure black phosphorus (BP) is commonly found to be a p-type semiconductor, suggesting the ubiquitious presence of impurity species or intrinsic, charged defects. Moreover, scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) images of black phosphorus reveal the presence of long-range doublelobed defect features superimposed onto the surface atomic lattice. We show that both the p-type doping of BP and the defect features observed in STM images can be attributed to substitutional tin impurities. We show that black phosphorus samples produced through two common synthesis pathways contain tin impurities, and we demonstrate that the ground state of substitutional tin impurities is negatively charged for a wide range of Fermi level positions within the BP band gap. The localized negative charge of the tin impurities induces hydrogenic states in the band gap, and it is the 2p level that sits at the valence band edge that gives rise to the double-lobed features observed in STM images.