Growth and characterization of tin disulfide single crystals

Tin disulfide is a layered semiconductor, crystallizing in the cadmium iodide structure, with a band gap of 2.2 eV. The layered structure makes it useful for many experiments where a semiconductor with a reproducible renewable surface is needed. The easy cleavage of the surface exposes a clean atomically flat surface for use as a substrate for the deposition of solid-state materials or molecules or scanning probe microscopy experiments. Its semiconducting properties are also useful for photoelectro-chemical dye sensitization studies. We report the crystal growth of this material by a Bridgman method with control of the dopant identity and level to obtain useful n-type semiconducting properties. Doping levels measured with both Hall effect and Mott Schottky analysis were well correlated. The electron mobility and hole diffusion lengths were also measured for the various doped crystals using solid-state and photoelectrochemical techniques.