Recent Progress in Two-Dimensional MoTe Hetero-Phase Homojunctions.

With the demand for low contact resistance and a clean interface in high-performance field-effect transistors, two-dimensional (2D) hetero-phase homojunctions, which comprise a semiconducting phase of a material as the channel and a metallic phase of the material as electrodes, have attracted growing attention in recent years. In particular, MoTe exhibits intriguing properties and its phase is easily altered from semiconducting 2H to metallic 1T' and vice versa, owing to the extremely small energy barrier between these two phases. MoTe thus finds potential applications in electronics as a representative 2D material with multiple phases. In this review, we briefly summarize recent progress in 2D MoTe hetero-phase homojunctions. We first introduce the properties of the diverse phases of MoTe, demonstrate the approaches to the construction of 2D MoTe hetero-phase homojunctions, and then show the applications of the homojunctions. Lastly, we discuss the prospects and challenges in this research field.