Revisiting the Hetero-Interface of Electrolyte/2D Materials in an Electric Double Layer Device.

Electric double layer (EDL) devices based on 2D materials have made great achievements for versatile electronic and opto-electronic applications; however, the ion dynamics and electric field distribution of the EDL at the electrolyte/2D material interface and their influence on the physical properties of 2D materials have not been clearly clarified. In this work, by using Kelvin probe force microscope and steady/transient optical techniques, the character of the EDL and its influence on the optical properties of monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) are probed. The potential drop, unscreened EDL potential distribution, and accumulated carriers at the electrolyte/TMD interface are revealed, which can be explained by nonlinear Thomas-Fermi theory. By monitoring the potential distribution along the channel, the evolution of the electric field-induced lateral junction in the TMD EDL transistor is accessed, giving rise to the better exploration of EDL device physics. More importantly, EDL gate-dependent carrier recombination and exciton-exciton annihilation in monolayer TMDs on lithium-ion solid state electrolyte (Li2 Al2 SiP2 TiO13 ) are evaluated for the first time, benefiting from the understanding of the interaction between ions, carriers, and excitons. The work will deepen the understanding of the EDL for the exploitation of functional device applications.

Femtosecond Laser-Driven Phase Engineering of WS2 for Nano-Periodic Phase Patterning and Sub-ppm Ammonia Gas Sensing.

Laser-driven phase transition of 2D transition metal dichalcogenides has attracted much attention due to its high flexibility and rapidity. However, there are some limitations during the laser irradiation process, especially the unsatisfied surface ablation, the inability of nanoscale phase patterning, and the unexploited physical properties of new phase. In this work, the well-controlled femtosecond (fs) laser-driven transformation from the metallic 2M-WS2 to the semiconducting 2H-WS2 is reported, which is confirmed to be a single-crystal to single-crystal transition without layer thinning or obvious ablation. Moreover, a highly ordered 2H/2M nano-periodic phase transition with a resolution of ≈435 nm is achieved, breaking through the existing size bottleneck of laser-driven phase transition, which is attributed to the selective deposition of plasmon energy induced by fs laser. It is also demonstrated that the achieved 2H-WS2 after laser irradiation contains rich sulfur vacancies, which exhibits highly competitive ammonia gas sensing performance, with a detection limit below 0.1 ppm and a fast response/recovery time of 43/67 s at room temperature. This study provides a new strategy for the preparation of the phase-selective transition homojunction and high-performance applications in electronics.

Anisotropic Signal Processing with Trigonal Selenium Nanosheet Synaptic Transistors.

Hardware implementation of an artificial neural network requires neuromorphic devices to process information with low energy consumption and high heterogeneity. Here we demonstrate an electrolyte-gated synaptic transistor (EGT) based on a trigonal selenium (t-Se) nanosheet. Due to the intrinsic low conductivity of the Se channel, the t-Se synaptic transistor exhibits ultralow energy consumption, less than 0.1 pJ per spike. More importantly, the intrinsic low symmetry of t-Se offers a strong anisotropy along its c- and a-axis in electrical conductance with a ratio of up to 8.6. The multiterminal EGT device exhibits an anisotropic response of filtering behavior to the same external stimulus, which enables it to mimic the heterogeneous signal transmission process of the axon-multisynapse biostructure in the human brain. The proof-of-concept device in this work represents an important step to develop neuromorphic electronics for processing complex signals.