Borophene is a novel kind of 2D nanomaterial that has received
widespread attention recently. Using semiconducting 2H-MoS2 as the substrate, here we theoretically constructed
a 2D van der Waals borophene/MoS2 heterostructure and explored
the transport properties and the sensing performance for organic molecules
CH4, C2H4, C2H2, CH3OH, and HCHO. On the basis of density functional
theory, we first investigated the adsorption behaviors of the organic
molecules on borophene in the heterostructure. The obtained results
show that the interactions between CH4, C2H4, or CH3OH and borophene are very weak; the three
organic molecules adopt physisorption. On the contrary, C2H2 and HCHO adopt chemisorption, and in the two organic
molecules, the chemical bonds of the C atoms change to sp3 hybridization, owing to the strong chemical interactions with borophene.
For the cases of chemisorption, utilizing nonequilibrium Green’s
function method, we studied the sensing performance of the heterostructure.
We found that the sensing performance of the heterostructure is strongly
anisotropic and that under very low bias voltages the heterostructure
is very sensitive to C2H2 and HCHO. As a result,
borophene/MoS2 heterostructure can be used as an excellent
2D gas sensor for organic molecules such as C2H2 and HCHO.