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A highly sensitive chemical gas detecting transistor based on highly crystalline CVD-grown MoSe2 films

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An Erratum to this article was published on 23 June 2017

Abstract

Layered semiconductors with atomic thicknesses are becoming increasingly important as active elements in high-performance electronic devices owing to their high carrier mobilities, large surface-to-volume ratios, and rapid electrical responses to their surrounding environments. Here, we report the first implementation of a highly sensitive chemical-vapor-deposition-grown multilayer MoSe2 field-effect transistor (FET) in a NO2 gas sensor. This sensor exhibited ultra-high sensitivity (S = ca. 1,907 for NO2 at 300 ppm), real-time response, and rapid on–off switching. The high sensitivity of our MoSe2 gas sensor is attributed to changes in the gap states near the valence band induced by the NO2 gas absorbed in the MoSe2, which leads to a significant increase in hole current in the off-state regime. Device modeling and quantum transport simulations revealed that the variation of gap states with NO2 concentration is the key mechanism in a MoSe2 FET-based NO2 gas sensor. This comprehensive study, which addresses material growth, device fabrication, characterization, and device simulations, not only indicates the utility of MoSe2 FETs for high-performance chemical sensors, but also establishes a fundamental understanding of how surface chemistry influences carrier transport in layered semiconductor devices.

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Acknowledgements

This research is also supported in part by the National Research Foundation of Korea (Nos. NRF-2013M3C1A3059590, NRF-2014M3A9D7070732, and NRF-2015R1A5A1037548). This work was supported in part by U.S. National Science Foundation under grant CMMI 826276, and in part by NSERC Discovery Grant (No. RGPIN-05920-2014). This research was supported by the Commercializations Promotion Agency for R&D Outcomes (COMPA) funded by the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning (MISP) and in part by the fund from the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) institutional program. Computing resources were provided by SHARCNET through Compute Canada. D. Y. acknowledges the financial support by WIN Nanofellowship. The authors would like to thank Prof. Jong-Soo Rhyee for supporting CVD MoSe2 flakes.

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Correspondence to Jaehyun Hur, Youngki Yoon or Sunkook Kim.

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These authors contributed equally to this work.

An erratum to this article is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12274-017-1725-x.

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Baek, J., Yin, D., Liu, N. et al. A highly sensitive chemical gas detecting transistor based on highly crystalline CVD-grown MoSe2 films. Nano Res. 10, 1861–1871 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-016-1291-7

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