Transition metal dichalcogenide metamaterials with atomic precision

• Published in: Nature communications Vol. 11; no. 1; pp. 1 - 8
• Main Authors: Munkhbat, Battulga, Yankovich, Andrew B., Baranov, Denis G., Verre, Ruggero, Olsson, Eva, Shegai, Timur O.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 14-09-2020; Nature Publishing Group; Nature Portfolio
• Subjects: 142/126; 147/135; 147/137; 147/143; 639/624/399/1015; 639/925/357/1018; Anisotropy; Chalcogenides; Crystallography; Etching; Fabrication; Graphene; Humanities and Social Sciences; Hydrogen peroxide; Metamaterials; Methods; multidisciplinary; Nanoribbons; Nanostructure; Optical properties; Physics; Plasma etching; Scanning electron microscopy; Science; Science (multidisciplinary); Stability; Transition metal compounds; Two dimensional materials
• ISSN: 2041-1723; 2041-1723
• DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-18428-2

The ability to extract materials just a few atoms thick has led to the discoveries of graphene, monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), and other important two-dimensional materials. The next step in promoting the understanding and utility of flatland physics is to study the one-dimensional edges of these two-dimensional materials as well as to control the edge-plane ratio. Edges typically exhibit properties that are unique and distinctly different from those of planes and bulk. Thus, controlling the edges would allow the design of materials with combined edge-plane-bulk characteristics and tailored properties, that is, TMD metamaterials. However, the enabling technology to explore such metamaterials with high precision has not yet been developed. Here we report a facile and controllable anisotropic wet etching method that allows scalable fabrication of TMD metamaterials with atomic precision. We show that TMDs can be etched along certain crystallographic axes, such that the obtained edges are nearly atomically sharp and exclusively zigzag-terminated. This results in hexagonal nanostructures of predefined order and complexity, including few-nanometer-thin nanoribbons and nanojunctions. Thus, this method enables future studies of a broad range of TMD metamaterials through atomically precise control of the structure.
Here, the authors devise a scalable method, based on anisotropic wet etching, to fabricate hexagonally shaped transition metal dichalcogenide nanostructures with smooth edges, which may serve as metamaterials with tailored optical properties.