Liquid metals come to the rescue of semiconductors

EurekAlert  October 11, 2020
In theory the two-dimensional materials can result in transistors that do not waste energy during their on/off switching. However, one of the barriers with the current technologies is that the deposited ultra-thin films are full of grain boundaries so that the charge carriers are bounced back from them and hence the resistive loss increases. An international team of researchers (Australia, UCLA) has developed a new method to eliminate grain boundaries using gallium metal in its liquid state. With its low melting point (29.8 deg C) its surface is atomically smooth when melted providing many free electrons for facilitating chemical reactions. By bringing the sources of molybdenum and sulphur near the surface of gallium liquid metal formed molybdenum sulphur bonds to establish MoS2. It is naturally nucleated and grain boundary free. By a second step annealing, they obtained large area MoS2 with no grain boundary. The process is a very important step for scaling up ultra-smooth semiconductor…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE

New deposition approach: synthesizing and exfoliating (transferring onto a silicon substrate for example) 2D semiconducting MoS2. Credit: FLEET

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