CPM Seminar

Probing atomic and electronic structures of 2D electronic materials and their heterostructures

Ken Shih

Department of Physics
The University of Texas at Austin

The emerging atomic layer materials offer a remarkably wide range of building blocks of nanostructures ranging from metals (e.g. graphene), large gap insulators (BN), to semiconductors (transition metal dichalcogenides and black phosphorous). Key advantages of these van der Waals materials include a broad span of energy gaps, flexibility of stacking different types of materials to form heterostructures, tunability in material properties by doping and strain, and the relative ease of integration with other electronic and photonic devices. This talk will be focused on the usage of scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy to probe the atomic and electronic structure of transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) and their heterostructures, including both vertical and lateral structure

I will first introduce a comprehensive form of scanning tunneling spectroscopy (STS) which allows us to probe not only the quasi-particle band gaps but also the critical point energy locations and their origins in the Brillouin Zone (BZ) can be revealed using this comprehensive form of STS. By using this new method, we unravel the systematic trend of the critical point energies for TMDs due to atomic orbital couplings, spin-orbital coupling and the interlayer coupling. By using the vertically stacked MoS2/WSe2, I will show how interlayer coupling can be used as a new designing parameter to create a lateral 2D electronic superlattices. I will then turn attention to MoS2/WSe2 lateral heterostructure where I will show a novel method to probe 2D strain tensor and how the strain changes the band profile as well as the band alignment at the interface.