Spatially Controlled Preparation of Layered Metallic-Semiconducting Metal Chalcogenide Heterostructures.

Spatially controlled preparation of heterostructures composed of layered materials is important in achieving interesting properties. Although vapor-phased deposition methods can prepare vertical and lateral heterostructures, liquid-phased methods, which can enable scalable production and further solution processes, have shown limited controllability. Herein, we demonstrate by using wet chemical methods that metallic SnMoS nanosheets can be deposited epitaxially on the edges of semiconducting SnS nanoplates to form SnS/SnMoS lateral heterostructures or coated on both the edges and basal surfaces of SnS to give SnS@SnMoS core@shell heterostructures. They also showed good light-to-heat conversion ability due to the metallic property of SnMoS. In particular, the core@shell heterostructure showed a higher photothermal conversion efficiency than the lateral counterpart, largely due to its randomly oriented and polycrystalline SnMoS layers with larger interfacing area for multiple internal light scattering.