Room-temperature oxygen transport in nano-thin BixOySez enables precision modulation of 2D materials

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that nanometer-thick BixOySez can enable fast, reversible, and spatially precise oxygen transport at room temperature, allowing for long-term modulation of 2D material properties with potential applications in advanced technologies.

Contribution

We synthesized a novel BixOySez compound and showed it can be used as a room-temperature oxygen transporter to precisely modulate 2D materials' properties.

Findings

Fast oxygen diffusion at room temperature under laser exposure.

Reversible and stable property modulation over 221 days.

Spatially confined modifications enabling submicron features.

Abstract

Oxygen conductors and transporters are important to several consequential renewable energy technologies, including fuel cells and syngas production. Separately, monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) have demonstrated significant promise for a range of applications, including quantum computing, advanced sensors, valleytronics, and next-gen optoelectronics. Here, we synthesize a few nanometer-thick BixOySez compound that strongly resembles a rare R3m bismuth oxide (Bi2O3) phase, and combine it with monolayer TMDs, which are highly sensitive to their environment. We use the resulting 2D heterostructure to study oxygen transport through BixOySez into the interlayer region, whereby the 2D material properties are modulated, finding extraordinarily fast diffusion at room temperature under laser exposure. The oxygen diffusion enables reversible and precise modification of the 2D material properties by controllably intercalating and deintercalating oxygen. Changes are spatially confined, enabling submicron features (e.g. pixels), and are long-term stable for more than 221 days. Our work suggests few nanometer-thick BixOySez is a promising unexplored room-temperature oxygen transporter. Additionally, our findings suggest the mechanism can be applied to other 2D materials as a generalized method to manipulate their properties with high precision and submicron spatial resolution.