Photoluminescence (PL) from monolayer MoS2 has been modulated using plasma treatment or thermal annealing. However, a systematic way of understanding the underlying PL modulation mechanism has not yet been achieved. By introducing PL and Raman spectroscopy, we analyze that the PL modulation by laser irradiation is associated with structural damage and associated oxygen adsorption on the sample in ambient conditions. Three distinct behaviors were observed according to the laser irradiation time: (i) slow photo-oxidation at the initial stage, where the physisorption of ambient gases gradually increases the PL intensity; (ii) fast photo-oxidation at a later stage, where chemisorption increases the PL intensity abruptly; and (iii) photoquenching, with complete reduction of PL intensity. The correlated confocal Raman spectroscopy confirms that no structural deformation is involved in slow photo-oxidation stage; however, the structural disorder is invoked during the fast photo-oxidation stage, and severe structural degradation is generated during the photoquenching stage. The effect of oxidation is further verified by repeating experiments in vacuum, where the PL intensity is simply degraded with laser irradiation in a vacuum due to a simple structural degradation without involving oxygen functional groups. The charge scattering by oxidation is further explained by the emergence/disappearance of neutral excitons and multiexcitons during each stage.
Keywords: AFM; Raman; molybdenum disulfide; photo-oxidation; photoluminescence; photoquenching.