Electron Excess Doping and Effective Schottky Barrier Reduction on the MoS2/h-BN Heterostructure.

Layered hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) thin film is a dielectric that surpasses carrier mobility by reducing charge scattering with silicon oxide in diverse electronics formed with graphene and transition metal dichalcogenides. However, the h-BN effect on electron doping concentration and Schottky barrier is little known. Here, we report that use of h-BN thin film as a substrate for monolayer MoS2 can induce ∼6.5 × 1011 cm-2 electron doping at room temperature which was determined using theoretical flat band model and interface trap density. The saturated excess electron concentration of MoS2 on h-BN was found to be ∼5 × 1013 cm-2 at high temperature and was significantly reduced at low temperature. Further, the inserted h-BN enables us to reduce the Coulombic charge scattering in MoS2/h-BN and lower the effective Schottky barrier height by a factor of 3, which gives rise to four times enhanced the field-effect carrier mobility and an emergence of metal-insulator transition at a much lower charge density of ∼1.0 × 1012 cm-2 (T = 25 K). The reduced effective Schottky barrier height in MoS2/h-BN is attributed to the decreased effective work function of MoS2 arisen from h-BN induced n-doping and the reduced effective metal work function due to dipole moments originated from fixed charges in SiO2.

Temperature-Dependent Opacity of the Gate Field Inside MoS2 Field-Effect Transistors.

The transport behaviors of MoS2 field-effect transistors (FETs) with various channel thicknesses are studied. In a 12 nm thick MoS2 FET, a typical switching behavior is observed with an Ion/Ioff ratio of 106. However, in 70 nm thick MoS2 FETs, the gating effect weakens with a large off-current, resulting from the screening of the gate field by the carriers formed through the ionization of S vacancies at 300 K. Hence, when the latter is dual-gated, two independent conductions develop with different threshold voltage (VTH) and field-effect mobility (µFE) values. When the temperature is lowered for the latter, both the ionization of S vacancies and the gate-field screening reduce, which revives the strong Ion/Ioff ratio and merges the two separate channels into one. Thus, only one each of VTH and µFE are seen from the thick MoS2 FET when the temperature is less than 80 K. The change of the number of conduction channels is attributed to the ionization of S vacancies, which leads to a temperature-dependent intra- and interlayer conductance and the attenuation of the electrostatic gate field. The defect-related transport behavior of thick MoS2 enables us to propose a new device structure that can be further developed to a vertical inverter inside a single MoS2 flake.

Understanding Coulomb Scattering Mechanism in Monolayer MoS2 Channel in the Presence of h-BN Buffer Layer.

As the thickness becomes thinner, the importance of Coulomb scattering in two-dimensional layered materials increases because of the close proximity between channel and interfacial layer and the reduced screening effects. The Coulomb scattering in the channel is usually obscured mainly by the Schottky barrier at the contact in the noise measurements. Here, we report low-temperature (T) noise measurements to understand the Coulomb scattering mechanism in the MoS2 channel in the presence of h-BN buffer layer on the silicon dioxide (SiO2) insulating layer. One essential measure in the noise analysis is the Coulomb scattering parameter (αSC) which is different for channel materials and electron excess doping concentrations. This was extracted exclusively from a 4-probe method by eliminating the Schottky contact effect. We found that the presence of h-BN on SiO2 provides the suppression of αSC twice, the reduction of interfacial traps density by 100 times, and the lowered Schottky barrier noise by 50 times compared to those on SiO2 at T = 25 K. These improvements enable us to successfully identify the main noise source in the channel, which is the trapping-detrapping process at gate dielectrics rather than the charged impurities localized at the channel, as confirmed by fitting the noise features to the carrier number and correlated mobility fluctuation model. Further, the reduction in contact noise at low temperature in our system is attributed to inhomogeneous distributed Schottky barrier height distribution in the metal-MoS2 contact region.

Suppression of Interfacial Current Fluctuation in MoTe2 Transistors with Different Dielectrics.

For transition metal dichalcogenides, the fluctuation of the channel current due to charged impurities is attributed to a large surface area and a thickness of a few nanometers. To investigate current variance at the interface of transistors, we obtain the low-frequency (LF) noise features of MoTe2 multilayer field-effect transistors with different dielectric environments. The LF noise properties are analyzed using the combined carrier mobility and carrier number fluctuation model which is additionally parametrized with an interfacial Coulomb-scattering parameter (α) that varies as a function of the accumulated carrier density (Nacc) and the location of the active channel layer of MoTe2. Our model shows good agreement with the current power spectral density (PSD) of MoTe2 devices from a low to high current range and indicates that the parameter α exhibits a stronger dependence on Nacc with an exponent -γ of -1.18 to approximately -1.64 for MoTe2 devices, compared with -0.5 for Si devices. The raised Coulomb scattering of the carriers, particularly for a low-current regime, is considered to be caused by the unique traits of layered semiconductors such as interlayer coupling and the charge distribution strongly affected by the device structure under a gate bias, which completely change the charge screening effect in MoTe2 multilayer. Comprehensive static and LF noise analyses of MoTe2 devices with our combined model reveal that a chemical-vapor deposited h-BN monolayer underneath MoTe2 channel and the Al2O3 passivation layer have a dissimilar contribution to the reduction of current fluctuation. The three-fold enhanced carrier mobility due to the h-BN is from the weakened carrier scattering at the gate dielectric interface and the additional 30% increase in carrier mobility by Al2O3 passivation is due to the reduced interface traps.