Chemical vapor deposition growth of monolayer Er-doped molybdenum disulfide for efficient optoelectronic injection

Abstract The doping strategy of two-dimensional (2D) transition metal dichalcogenides has been widely used to modify the intrinsic properties to satisfy the potential applications in electronics, photonics and magnetics. Rare-earth element with abundant optical properties making it an ideal dopant to endow 2D materials with improved optoelectronic properties. However, the large atomic size of rare-earth elements making them hard to be substituted doping into 2D lattices. Here we report the chemical vapor deposition growth of erbium (Er) substitutional doped monolayer molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) with a doping concentration of 0.3 %. An analysis of photoluminescent mapping was developed to evaluate the variance of uniformity of Er doping in MoS2 to be 0.003 eV. The density functional theory calculation demonstrates the existence of impurity state in band gap caused by Er doping. The modification of electronic structure accelerates the opto-electron injection efficient and improve the optoelectronic performance of the Er-MoS2 field effect transistor. This work develops an easy approach to estimate the degree of doping uniformity of monolayer 2D materials and demonstrates their applications in optoelectronics.