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Thickness determination of MoS2, MoSe2, WS2 and WSe2 on transparent stamps used for deterministic transfer of 2D materials

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Abstract

Here, we propose a method to determine the thickness of the most common transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) placed on the surface of transparent stamps, used for the deterministic placement of two-dimensional materials, by analyzing the red, green and blue channels of transmission-mode optical microscopy images of the samples. In particular, the blue channel transmittance shows a large and monotonic thickness dependence, making it a very convenient probe of the flake thickness. The method proves to be robust given the small flake-to-flake variation and the insensitivity to doping changes of MoS2. We also tested the method for MoSe2, WS2 and WSe2. These results provide a reference guide to identify the number of layers of this family of materials on transparent substrates only using optical microscopy.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Prof. Der-Yuh Lin and Prof. Tsung-Shine Ko for providing the doped MoS2 samples. N. S. T. acknowledges to the Ministry of Science, Research and Technology of Iran. A. C. G. and P. G. acknowledge funding from the European Commission Graphene Flagship (Grant Graphene Core 2 785219). R. F. acknowledges support from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) through the research program Rubicon with project number 680-50-1515. A. C. G. acknowledge funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no 755655, ERC-StG 2017 project 2D-TOPSENSE).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Materials Science Factory, Instituto de Ciencia de Materiales de Madrid (ICMM), Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz 3, 28049, Madrid, Spain

    Najme S. Taghavi, Patricia Gant, Peng Huang, Mar García-Hernández, Riccardo Frisenda & Andres Castellanos-Gomez

  2. Faculty of Physics, Khaje Nasir Toosi University of Technology (KNTU), Tehrān, 19697 64499, Iran

    Najme S. Taghavi

  3. State Key Laboratory of Tribology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

    Peng Huang

  4. Institute of Physics and Center for Nanotechnology, University of Münster, 48149, Münster, Germany

    Iris Niehues, Robert Schmidt, Steffen Michaelis de Vasconcellos & Rudolf Bratschitsch

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  1. Najme S. Taghavi
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  2. Patricia Gant
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  3. Peng Huang
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  4. Iris Niehues
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  5. Robert Schmidt
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  6. Steffen Michaelis de Vasconcellos
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  7. Rudolf Bratschitsch
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  8. Mar García-Hernández
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  9. Riccardo Frisenda
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  10. Andres Castellanos-Gomez
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Correspondence to Patricia Gant, Riccardo Frisenda or Andres Castellanos-Gomez.

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Thickness determination of MoS2, MoSe2, WS2 and WSe2 on transparent stamps used for deterministic transfer of 2D materials

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Taghavi, N.S., Gant, P., Huang, P. et al. Thickness determination of MoS2, MoSe2, WS2 and WSe2 on transparent stamps used for deterministic transfer of 2D materials. Nano Res. 12, 1691–1695 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-019-2424-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-019-2424-6

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