Electrical Stressing Induced Monolayer Vacancy Island Growth on TiSe2
arXiv:1706.05096 · doi:10.1021/acs.nanolett.8b00515
Abstract
To ensure the practical application of atomically thin transition metal dichalcogenides, it is essential to characterize their structural stability under external stimuli such as electric fields and currents. Using vacancy monolayer islands on TiSe2 surfaces as a model system, for the first time we have observed a shape evolution and growth from triangular to hexagonal driven by scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) electrical stressing. The size of islands shows linear growth with a rate of (3.00 +- 0.05) x 10-3 nm/s, when the STM scanning parameters are held fixed at Vs = 1.0 V and I = 1.8 nA. We further quantified how the growth rate is related to the tunneling current magnitude. Our simulations of monolayer island evolution using phase-field modeling are in good agreement with our experimental observations, and point towards preferential edge atom dissociation under STM scanning driving the observed growth. The results could be potentially important for device applications of ultrathin transition metal dichalcogenides and related 2D materials subject to electrical stressing under device operating conditions.
arXiv comment24 pages, 5 figures
References in corpus (9)
- Atomically thin MoS2: A new direct-gap semiconductor
- Single-Layer MoS2 Phototransistors
- Mobility engineering and metal-insulator transition in monolayer MoS2
- Two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenides under electron irradiation: defect production and doping
- Spatially Resolving Spin-split Edge States of Chiral Graphene Nanoribbons
- Orbital textures and charge density waves in transition metal dichalcogenides
- Chiral charge-density-waves
- Doping nature of native defects in 1T-TiSe2
- Femtosecond data storage, processing and search using collective excitations of a macroscopic quantum state