Air Stable Doping and Intrinsic Mobility Enhancement in Monolayer Molybdenum Disulfide by Amorphous Titanium Suboxide Encapsulation

To reduce Schottky-barrier-induced contact and access resistance, and the impact of charged impurity and phonon scattering on mobility in devices based on 2D transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), considerable effort has been put into exploring various doping techniques and dielectric engineering using high-kappa oxides, respectively. The goal of this work is to demonstrate a high-kappa dielectric that serves as an effective n-type charge transfer dopant on monolayer (ML) molybdenum disulfide (MoS2). Utilizing amorphous titanium suboxide (ATO) as the high-kappa dopant, we achieved a contact resistance of similar to 480 Omega.mu m that is the lowest reported value for ML MoS2. An ON current as high as 240 mu A/mu m and field effect mobility as high as 83 cm(2)/V-s were realized using this doping technique. Moreover, intrinsic mobility as high as 102 cm(2)/V-s at 300 K and 501 cm(2)/V-s at 77 K were achieved after ATO encapsulation that are among the highest mobility values reported on ML MoS2. We also analyzed the doping effect of ATO films on ML MoS2, a phenomenon that is absent when stoichiometric TiO2 is used, using ab initio density functional theory (DFT) calculations that shows excellent agreement with our experimental findings. On the basis of the interfacial-oxygen-vacancy mediated doping as seen in the case of high-kappa ATO ML MoS2, we propose a mechanism for the mobility enhancement effect observed in TMD-based devices after encapsulation in a high-kappa dielectric environment.