Effect of Substrate symmetry on the dendrite morphology of MoS2 Film synthesized by CVD

In van der Waals epitaxial growth, the substrate plays a particularly important role in the crystal morphology. Here, we synthesized MoS2 by chemical vapour deposition on silicon carbide (SiC). The obtained MoS2 dendritic crystals show six-fold symmetry, which are different from the conventional triangular shapes on SiO2 substrate and from those with three-fold symmetry on SrTiO3 substrate. Interestingly, these MoS2 dendritic crystals on SiC exhibit an average fractal dimension 1.76, which is slightly larger than the classical Diffusion-limited-Aggregation fractal dimension 1.66. The first principle calculation indicates that the six-fold symmetry of the dendritic MoS2 is determined by the lattice symmetry of SiC. To further demonstrating the substrate effect, we break the natural sixfold lattice symmetry of SiC (0001) into groove arrays through etching the substrate. And then we successfully synthesized cross-type dendritic crystal MoS2 with two-fold symmetry. Its average fractal dimension 1.83 is slightly larger than the fractal dimension 1.76 of the previous MoS2 dendrite with six-fold symmetry. In a word, the symmetry of SiC substrate determined the symmetry and the fractal dimension of the dendritic MoS2. This work provides one possibility of inducing the growth orientation of dendritic crystals through controlling the substrate surface symmetry artificially.