An Automated System for Strain Engineering and Straintronics of 2D Materials

This work presents an automated three-point bending apparatus that can be used to study strain engineering and straintronics in 2D materials. This work benchmarks the system by reporting reproducible strain tuned micro-reflectance, Raman, and photoluminescence spectra for monolayer molybdenum disulfide (MoS2). These results are in good agreement with reported literature using conventional bending apparatus. This work further utilizes the system to automate strain investigations of straintronic devices by measuring the piezoresistive effect and the strain effect on photoresponse in an MoS2 electrical device. The details of the construction of the straightforward system are given and it is anticipated that it can be easily implemented for study of strain engineering and straintronics in a wide variety of 2D material systems

Microheater Actuators as a Versatile Platform for Strain Engineering in 2D Materials

We present microfabricated thermal actuators to engineer the biaxial strain in two-dimensional (2D) materials. These actuators are based on microheater circuits patterned onto the surface of a polymer with a high thermal expansion coefficient. By running current through the microheater one can vary the temperature of the polymer and induce a controlled biaxial expansion of its surface. This controlled biaxial expansion can be transduced to biaxial strain to 2D materials, placed onto the polymer surface, which in turn induces a shift of the optical spectrum. Our thermal strain actuators can reach a maximum biaxial strain of 0.64%, and they can be modulated at frequencies up to 8 Hz. The compact geometry of these actuators results in a negligible spatial drift of 0.03 μm/°C, which facilitates their integration in optical spectroscopy measurements. We illustrate the potential of this strain engineering platform to fabricate a strain-actuated optical modulator with single-layer MoS2

High throughput characterization of epitaxially grown single-layer MoS2

The growth of single-layer MoS2 with chemical vapor deposition is an established method that can produce large-area and high quality samples. In this article, we investigate the geometrical and optical properties of hundreds of individual single-layer MoS2 crystallites grown on a highly-polished sapphire substrate. Most of the crystallites are oriented along the terraces of the sapphire substrate and have an area comprised between 10 µm2 and 60 µm2. Differential reflectance measurements performed on these crystallites show that the area of the MoS2 crystallites has an influence on the position and broadening of the B exciton while the orientation does not influence the A and B excitons of MoS2. These measurements demonstrate that differential reflectance measurements have the potential to be used to characterize the homogeneity of large-area chemical vapor deposition (CVD)-grown samples

Atomically thin p-n junctions based on two-dimensional materials

Recent research in two-dimensional (2D) materials has boosted a renovated interest in the p-n junction, one of the oldest electrical components which can be used in electronics and optoelectronics. 2D materials offer remarkable flexibility to design novel p-n junction device architectures, not possible with conventional bulk semiconductors. In this Review we thoroughly describe the different 2D p-n junction geometries studied so far, focusing on vertical (out-of-plane) and lateral (in-plane) 2D junctions and on mixed-dimensional junctions. We discuss the assembly methods developed to fabricate 2D p-n junctions making a distinction between top-down and bottom-up approaches. We also revise the literature studying the different applications of these atomically thin p-n junctions in electronic and optoelectronic devices. We discuss experiments on 2D p-n junctions used as current rectifiers, photodetectors, solar cells and light emitting devices. The important electronics and optoelectronics parameters of the discussed devices are listed in a table to facilitate their comparison. We conclude the Review with a critical discussion about the future outlook and challenges of this incipient research field

A strain tunable single-layer MoS2 photodetector

Strain engineering, which aims to tune the bandgap of a semiconductor by the application of strain, has emerged as an interesting way to control the electrical and optical properties of two-dimensional (2D) materials. Apart from the changes in the intrinsic properties of 2D materials, the application of strain can also be used to modify the characteristics of devices based on them. In this work, we study flexible and transparent photodetectors based on single-layer MoS2 under the application of biaxial strain. We find that by controlling the level of strain, we can tune the photoresponsivity (by 2–3 orders of magnitude), the response time (from <80 ms to 1.5 s), and the spectral bandwidth (with a gauge factor of 135 meV/% or 58 nm/%) of the device

Symmetry Breakdown in Franckeite: Spontaneous Strain, Rippling, and Interlayer Moire

Franckeite is a naturally occurring layered mineral with a structure composed of alternating stacks of SnS2-like and PbS-like layers. Although this superlattice is composed of a sequence of isotropic two-dimensional layers, it exhibits a spontaneous rippling that makes the material structurally anisotropic. We demonstrate that this rippling comes hand in hand with an inhomogeneous in-plane strain profile and anisotropic electrical, vibrational, and optical properties. We argue that this symmetry breakdown results from a spatial modulation of the van der Waals interaction between layers due to the SnS2-like and PbS-like lattices incommensurability

Biaxial strain tuning of the optical properties of single-layer transition metal dichalcogenides

Since their discovery, single-layer semiconducting transition metal dichalcogenides have attracted much attention, thanks to their outstanding optical and mechanical properties. Strain engineering in these two-dimensional materials aims to tune their bandgap energy and to modify their optoelectronic properties by the application of external strain. In this paper, we demonstrate that biaxial strain, both tensile and compressive, can be applied and released in a timescale of a few seconds in a reproducible way on transition metal dichalcogenides monolayers deposited on polymeric substrates. We can control the amount of biaxial strain applied by letting the substrate expand or compress. To do this, we change the substrate temperature and choose materials with a large thermal expansion coefficient. After the investigation of the substrate-dependent strain transfer, we performed micro-differential spectroscopy of four transition metal dichalcogenides monolayers (MoS2, MoSe2, WS2, WSe2) under the application of biaxial strain and measured their optical properties. For tensile strain, we observe a redshift of the bandgap that reaches a value as large as 95 meV/% in the case of single-layer WS2 deposited on polypropylene. The observed bandgap shifts as a function of substrate extension/compression follow the order MoSe2 < MoS2 < WSe2 < WS2. Theoretical calculations of these four materials under biaxial strain predict the same trend for the material-dependent rates of the shift and reproduce well the features observed in the measured reflectance spectra