Liquid-Metal-Based Spin-Coating Exfoliation for Atomically Thin Metal Oxide Synthesis.

Two-dimensional (2D) semiconductors possess exceptional electronic, optical, and magnetic properties, making them highly desirable for widespread applications. However, conventional mechanical exfoliation and epitaxial growth methods are insufficient in meeting the demand for atomically thin films covering large areas while maintaining high quality. Herein, leveraging liquid metal oxidation reaction, we propose a motorized spin-coating exfoliation strategy to efficiently produce large-area 2D metal oxide (2DMO) semiconductors with high crystallinity, atomically thin thickness, and flat surfaces on diverse substrates. Moreover, we realized a 2D gallium oxide-based deep ultraviolet solar-blind photodetector featuring a metal-semiconductor-metal structure, showcasing high responsivity (8.24 A W-1) at 254 nm and excellent sensitivity (4.3 × 1012 cm Hz1/2 W-1). This novel liquid-metal-based spin-coating exfoliation strategy offers great potential for synthesizing atomically thin 2D semiconductors, opening new avenues for future functional electronic and optical applications.

Epitaxial Growth of Large Area Two-Dimensional Ferroelectric α-In2Se3.

Two-dimensional (2D) ferroelectric materials have attracted intensive attention in recent years for academic research. However, the synthesis of large-scale 2D ferroelectric materials for electronic applications is still challenging. Here, we report the successful synthesis of centimeter-scale ferroelectric In2Se3 films by selenization of In2O3 in a confined space chemical vapor deposition method. The as-grown homogeneous thin film has a uniform thickness of 5 nm with robust out-of-plane ferroelectricity at room temperature. Scanning transmission electron microscopy and Raman spectroscopy reveal that the thin film is 2H stacking α-In2Se3 with excellent crystalline quality. Electronic transport measurements of In2Se3 highlight the current-voltage hysteresis and polarization modulated diode effect due to the switchable Schottky barrier height (SBH). First-principles calculations reveal that the polarization modulated SBH is originated from the competition between interface charge transfer and polarized charge. The large area growth of epitaxial In2Se3 opens up potential applications of In2Se3 in novel nanoelectronics.

Fast-RCM: Fast Tree-Based Unsupervised Rare-Class Mining.

Rare classes are usually hidden in an imbalanced dataset with the majority of the data examples from major classes. Rare-class mining (RCM) aims at extracting all the data examples belonging to rare classes. Most of the existing approaches for RCM require a certain amount of labeled data examples as input. However, they are ineffective in practice since requesting label information from domain experts is time consuming and human-labor extensive. Thus, we investigate the unsupervised RCM problem, which to the best of our knowledge is the first such attempt. To this end, we propose an efficient algorithm called Fast-RCM for unsupervised RCM, which has an approximately linear time complexity with respect to data size and data dimensionality. Given an unlabeled dataset, Fast-RCM mines out the rare class by first building a rare tree for the input dataset and then extracting data examples of the rare classes based on this rare tree. Compared with the existing approaches which have quadric or even cubic time complexity, Fast-RCM is much faster and can be extended to large-scale datasets. The experimental evaluation on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our algorithm can effectively and efficiently extract the rare classes from an unlabeled dataset under the unsupervised settings, and is approximately five times faster than that of the state-of-the-art methods.

Deeply Exploring Anisotropic Evolution toward Large-Scale Growth of Monolayer ReS2.

Among large numbers of transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs), monolayer rhenium disulfide (ReS2) is of particular interest due to its unique structural anisotropy, which opens up unprecedented opportunities in dichroic atomical electronics. Understanding the domain structure and controlling the anisotropic evolution of ReS2 during the growth is considered critical for increasing the domain size toward a large-scale growth of monolayer ReS2. Herein, by employing angle-resolved Raman spectroscopy, we reveal that the hexagonal ReS2 domain is constructed by six well-defined subdomains with each b-axis parallel to the diagonal of the hexagon. By further combining the first-principles calculations and the transmission electron microscopy (TEM) characterization, a dislocation-involved anisotropic evolution is proposed to explain the formation of the domain structures and understand the limitation of the domain size. Based on these findings, growth rates of different crystal planes are well controlled to enlarge the domain size, and moreover, single-crystal domains with a triangle shape are obtained. With the improved domain size, large-scale uniform, strictly monolayer ReS2 films are grown further. Scalable field-effect transistor (FET) arrays are constructed, which show good electrical performances comparable or even superior to that of the single domains reported at room temperature. This work not only sheds light on comprehending the novel growth mechanism of ReS2 but also offers a robust and controllable strategy for the synthesis of large-area and high-quality two-dimensional materials with low structural symmetry.

Synthesis of Wafer-Scale Monolayer WS2 Crystals toward the Application in Integrated Electronic Devices.

Two-dimensional transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) possess unique electronic and optical properties, which open up a new opportunity for atomically thin optoelectronic devices. Synthesizing large-scale monolayer TMDCs on the SiO2/Si substrate is crucial for practical applications, however, it remains a big challenge. In this work, a method which combines chemical vapor deposition (CVD) and thermal evaporation was employed to grow monolayer tungsten disulfide (WS2) crystals. Through controlling the density and the distribution of W precursors, a wafer-scale continuous uniform WS2 film was achieved, with the structural and spectral characterizations confirming a monolayer configuration and a high crystalline quality. Wafer-scale field-effect transistor arrays based on the monolayer WS2 were fabricated. The devices show superior electrical performances, and the maximal mobility is almost 1 order of magnitude higher than those of CVD-grown large-scale TMDC devices reported so far.