Epitaxial growth of large area ZrS2 2D semiconductor films on sapphire for optoelectronics

• Published in: Nano research 2022-07, Vol.15 (7), p.6628-6635
• Main Authors: Tian, Yan, Cheng, Yong, Huang, Jidong, Zhang, Siyu, Dong, Hao, Wang, Gaokai, Chen, Jingren, Wu, Jinliang, Yin, Zhigang, Zhang, Xingwang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Aluminum oxide; Atomic/Molecular Structure and Spectra; Biomedicine; Biotechnology; Chemical vapor deposition; Chemistry and Materials Science; Condensed Matter Physics; Epitaxial growth; Materials Science; N-type semiconductors; Nanotechnology; Optoelectronic devices; Optoelectronics; Photometers; Physical properties; Research Article; Room temperature; Sapphire; Semiconductors; Substrates; Thin films; Transition metal compounds; Zirconium
• ISSN: 1998-0124; 1998-0000
• DOI: 10.1007/s12274-022-4308-4

Recently, group-IVB semiconducting transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) of ZrS 2 have attracted significant research interest due to its layered nature, moderate band gap, and extraordinary physical properties. Most device applications require a deposition of high quality large-area uniform ZrS 2 single crystalline films, which has not yet been achieved. In this work, for the first time, we demonstrate the epitaxial growth of high quality large-area uniform ZrS 2 films on c -plane sapphire substrates by chemical vapor deposition. An atomically sharp interface is observed due to the supercell matching between ZrS 2 and sapphire, and their epitaxial relationship is found to be ZrS 2 (0001)[101̄0]∥Al 2 O 3 (0001)[112̄0]. The epitaxial ZrS 2 film exhibits n-type semiconductor behavior with a room temperature mobility of 2.4 cm 2 ·V −1 ·s −1 , and the optical phonon is the dominant scattering mechanism at room temperature or above. Furthermore, the optoelectronic applications of ZrS 2 films are demonstrated by fabricating photodetector devices. The ZrS 2 photodetectors exhibit the excellent comprehensive performance, such as a light on/off ratio of 10 6 and a specific detectivity of 2.6 × 10 12 Jones, which are the highest values compared with the photodetectors based on other group-IVB two-dimensional TMDs.