Increased yield of MoS2 monolayer exfoliation through the bimetallic corrosion of aluminum

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a corrosion assisted exfoliation method as an improvement to the traditional tape exfoliation to obtain transition-metal dichalcogenide monolayers. Our method primarily relies on the electrochemical potential difference between transition metals and aluminum. The assistance of bubbles resulting from the bimetallic corrosion increases the yield of the exfoliation process for monolayers by 30-fold while boosting the probability of obtaining isolated monolayers. We use Raman measurements and a statistical comparison of the improved method with tape exfoliation to lay the evidence for our findings.