A General Method for the Chemical Synthesis of Large-Scale, Seamless Transition Metal Dichalcogenide Electronics

The capability to directly build atomically thin transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) devices by chemical synthesis offers important opportunities to achieve large-scale electronics and optoelectronics with seamless interfaces. Here, a general approach for the chemical synthesis of a variety of TMD (e.g., MoS₂ , WS₂ , and MoSe₂ ) device arrays over large areas is reported. During chemical vapor deposition, semiconducting TMD channels and metallic TMD/carbon nanotube (CNT) hybrid electrodes are simultaneously formed on CNT-patterned substrate, and then coalesce into seamless devices. Chemically synthesized TMD devices exhibit attractive electrical and mechanical properties. It is demonstrated that chemically synthesized MoS₂ -MoS₂ /CNT devices have Ohmic contacts between MoS₂ /CNT hybrid electrodes and MoS₂ channels. In addition, MoS₂ -MoS₂ /CNT devices show greatly enhanced mechanical stability and photoresponsivity compared with conventional gold-contacted devices, which makes them suitable for flexible optoelectronics. Accordingly, a highly flexible pixel array based on chemically synthesized MoS₂ -MoS₂ /CNT photodetectors is applied for image sensing.