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Direct bandgap engineering with local biaxial strain in few-layer MoS2 bubbles

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Abstract

Strain engineering provides an important strategy to modulate the optical and electrical properties of semiconductors for improving devices performance with mechanical force or thermal expansion difference. Here, we present the investigation of the local strain distribution over few-layer MoS2 bubbles, by using scanning photoluminescence and Raman spectroscopies. We observe the obvious direct bandgap emissions with strain in the few-layer MoS2 bubble and the strain-induced continuous energy shifts of both resonant excitons and vibrational modes from the edge of the MoS2 bubble to the center (10 µm scale), associated with the oscillations resulted from the optical interference-induced temperature distribution. To understand these results, we perform ab initio simulations to calculate the electronic and vibrational properties of few-layer MoS2 with biaxial tensile strain, based on density functional theory, finding good agreement with the experimental results. Our study suggests that local strain offers a convenient way to continuously tune the physical properties of a few-layer transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) semiconductor, and opens up new possibilities for band engineering within the 2D plane.

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Acknowledgements

This work was financially supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (Nos. 2016YFA0200400, 2016YFA0200800, 2016YFA0200603, 2017YFA0204904, 2019YFA0308000, and 2018YFA0704200), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 61888102, 11574369, 11674387, 11574368, 11574385, and 11874405), the Key Research Program of Frontier Sciences of CAS (No. QYZDJSSWSLH042), and the Youth Innovation Promotion Association of CAS (No. 2019007). B. L. thanks the Supercomputing Center at USTC, Supercomputing Center of Chinese Academy of Sciences in Tianjin, and Shanghai Supercomputer Center for providing the computing resources.

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  1. Yang Guo, Bin Li, and Yuan Huang contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Beijing National Laboratory for Condensed Matter Physics, Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China

    Yang Guo, Yuan Huang, Shuo Du, Chi Sun, Hailan Luo, Baoli Liu, Xingjiang Zhou, Junjie Li & Changzhi Gu

  2. School of Physical Sciences, CAS Key Laboratory of Vacuum Physics, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China

    Yang Guo, Shuo Du, Chi Sun, Baoli Liu, Junjie Li & Changzhi Gu

  3. Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale and Synergetic Innovation Center of Quantum Information & Quantum Physics (CAS), University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230026, China

    Bin Li & Jinlong Yang

  4. Songshan Lake Materials Laboratory, Dongguan, 523808, China

    Baoli Liu & Junjie Li

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  1. Yang Guo
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Correspondence to Changzhi Gu.

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Guo, Y., Li, B., Huang, Y. et al. Direct bandgap engineering with local biaxial strain in few-layer MoS2 bubbles. Nano Res. 13, 2072–2078 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-020-2809-6

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