Transferring semiconductor monolayers offers material benefits

The technique is claimed to be much faster than existing methods and can transfer the atomic scale thin films from one substrate to others, without causing any cracks.

At issue are molybdenum sulphide (MoS₂) thin films that are only one atom thick, first developed by Dr. Linyou Cao, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at NC State. MoS₂ is an inexpensive semiconductor material with electronic and optical properties similar to materials already used in the semiconductor industry.

‘The ultimate goal is to use these atomic-layer semiconducting thin films to create devices that are extremely flexible, but to do that we need to transfer the thin films from the substrate we used to make it to a flexible substrate,’ said Cao, who is senior author of a paper on the new transfer technique. ‘You can’t make the thin film on a flexible substrate because flexible substrates can’t withstand the high temperatures you need to make the thin film.’