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Low-temperature electrical conduction of plasma-treated bilayer MoS2

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Abstract

We report on the low-temperature electrical characterization of bilayer MoS2 treated with increasing dose of oxygen:argon (1:3) plasma. We characterize the effective Schottky barrier heights as a function of plasma exposure time and observe a significant barrier lowering, with no accompanying p-type conduction in the negative bias region. Furthermore, we observe a crossover in the temperature-dependent conduction regimes below 181 K due to the plasma exposure. The Efros-Shklovskii (ES) hopping regime is seen to transform upon plasma exposure to a mixed ES/thermally-activated regime at high temperatures, and to a strongly short-range Arrhenius regime at low temperatures. We attribute the observed crossovers to a critical defect density created by the surface reaction with the plasma.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to members of staff at the Advanced Microscopy Laboratory, CRANN, Trinity College Dublin for their continued technical support. We thank Robert O’Connell for assistance with liquid nitrogen, and Daniel S. Fox for assistance with TEM. The work at the School of Physics and the Centre for Research on Adaptive Nanostructures and Nanodevices at Trinity College Dublin is supported by Science Foundation Ireland [grant No: 11/PI/ 1105, 12/TIDA/I2433 07/SK/I1220a].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Physics, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland

    Jakub Jadwiszczak

  2. Centre for Research on Adaptive Nanostructures and Nanodevices (CRANN), Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland

    Jakub Jadwiszczak

  3. Advanced Materials and BioEngineering Research Centre (AMBER), Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland

    Jakub Jadwiszczak

  4. School of Material Science and Engineering, Nanchang University, 999 Xuefu Road, Nanchang, Jiangxi, 330031, China

    Jakub Jadwiszczak & Yangbo Zhou

  5. School of Physics, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland

    Hongzhou Zhang

  6. Centre for Research on Adaptive Nanostructures and Nanodevices (CRANN), Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland

    Hongzhou Zhang

  7. Advanced Materials and BioEngineering Research Centre (AMBER), Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland

    Hongzhou Zhang

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  1. Jakub Jadwiszczak
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Correspondence to Hongzhou Zhang.

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The supplementary material for this article can be found at https://doi.org/10.1557/mrc.2018.72

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Jadwiszczak, J., Zhou, Y. & Zhang, H. Low-temperature electrical conduction of plasma-treated bilayer MoS2. MRS Communications 8, 514–520 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1557/mrc.2018.72

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