Comparative Study between Sulfurized MoS from Molybdenum and Molybdenum Trioxide Precursors for Thin-Film Device Applications.

Two-dimensional (2D) materials have been studied as an emerging class of nanomaterials owing to their attractive properties in nearly every field of science and technology. Molybdenum disulfide (MoS) is one of the more promising candidates of these atomically thin 2D materials for its technological potential. The facile synthesis of MoS remains a matter of broad interest. In this study, MoS was synthesized by chemical vapor deposition sulfurization at various temperatures (550 °C, 650 °C, and 750 °C) of either precursor molybdenum metal (Mo) or molybdenum trioxide (MoO) deposited on silicon/silicon dioxide (Si/SiO) via e-beam evaporation. Monolayer, bilayer, and few layers sulfurized samples have been grown and verified by Raman, photoluminescence spectroscopy, XRD, XPS, and AFM. MoO sulfurization provided monolayer growth in comparison to Mo sulfurization under the same conditions and precursor thicknesses. Optical microscopy showed the homogeneous nature of grown samples. A main finding of this work is that MoO sulfurization produced higher quality MoS as compared to those grown by an Mo precursor. Device characteristics based on monolayer MoO sulfurized MoS include nonvolatile resistive switching with / ≈ 10 at a relatively low operating bias of ±1 V. In addition, field-effect transistor characteristics revealed p-type material growth with a carrier mobility ∼ 41 cm V s, which is in contrast to typically observed n-type characteristics.