Improved properties arise in transition metal dichalcogenide (TMDC) materials when they are stacked onto insulating hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN). Therefore, the scalable fabrication of TMDCs/h-BN heterostructures by direct chemical vapor deposition (CVD) growth is highly desirable. Unfortunately, to achieve this experimentally is challenging. Ideal substrates for h-BN growth, such as Ni, become sulfides during the synthesis process. This leads to the decomposition of the pregrown h-BN film, and thus no TMDCs/h-BN heterostructure forms. Here, we report a thoroughly direct CVD approach to obtain TMDCs/h-BN vertical heterostructures without any intermediate transfer steps. This is attributed to the use of a nickel-based alloy with excellent sulfide-resistant properties and a high catalytic activity for h-BN growth. The strategy enables the direct growth of single-crystal MoS2 grains of up to 200 μm(2) on h-BN, which is approximately 1 order of magnitude larger than that in previous reports. The direct band gap of our grown single-layer MoS2 on h-BN is 1.85 eV, which is quite close to that for free-standing exfoliated equivalents. This strategy is not limited to MoS2-based heterostructures and so allows the fabrication of a variety of TMDCs/h-BN heterostructures, suggesting the technique has promise for nanoelectronics and optoelectronic applications.
Keywords: MoS2/h-BN heterostructures; direct CVD growth; optical properties; sulfide-resistant alloy.