Direct growth of single- and few-layer MoS2 on h-BN with preferred relative rotation angles

TL;DR

This paper reports a scalable chemical vapor deposition method for directly growing monolayer and few-layer MoS2 on h-BN substrates, revealing preferred lattice orientations and maintaining intrinsic electronic properties, advancing 2D material device fabrication.

Contribution

It introduces a scalable CVD process for direct MoS2 growth on h-BN with controlled orientation, improving fabrication efficiency for 2D heterostructures.

Findings

Distinct growth mechanisms for single- and few-layer MoS2.

Low relative rotation angles (<5°) are common in single-layer growth.

MoS2 retains its 1.89 eV bandgap when grown on h-BN.

Abstract

Monolayer molybdenum disulphide (MoS2) is a promising two-dimensional direct-bandgap semiconductor with potential applications in atomically thin and flexible electronics. An attractive insulating substrate or mate for MoS2 (and related materials such as graphene) is hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN). Stacked heterostructures of MoS2 and h-BN have been produced by manual transfer methods, but a more efficient and scalable assembly method is needed. Here we demonstrate the direct growth of single- and few-layer MoS2 on h-BN by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) method, which is scalable with suitably structured substrates. The growth mechanisms for single-layer and few-layer samples are found to be distinct, and for single-layer samples low relative rotation angles (<5 degree) between the MoS2 and h-BN lattices prevail. Moreover, MoS2 directly grown on h-BN maintains its intrinsic 1.89 eV bandgap. Our CVD synthesis method presents an important advancement towards controllable and scalable MoS2 based electronic devices.