Document Type

Article

Publication Date

March 2014

Publication Title

Applied Physics Letters

Volume

104

DOI

10.1063/1.4869149

ISSN

0003-6951

Disciplines

Materials Science and Engineering

Abstract

The effect of room temperature ultraviolet-ozone (UV-O3) exposure of MoS2 on the uniformity of subsequent atomic layer deposition of Al2O3 is investigated. It is found that a UV-O3 pre-treatment removes adsorbed carbon contamination from the MoS2 surface and also functionalizes the MoS2 surface through the formation of a weak sulfur-oxygen bond without any evidence of molybdenum-sulfur bond disruption. This is supported by first principles density functional theory calculations which show that oxygen bonded to a surface sulfur atom while the sulfur is simultaneously back-bonded to three molybdenum atoms is a thermodynamically favorable configuration. The adsorbed oxygen increases the reactivity of MoS2 surface and provides nucleation sites for atomic layer deposition of Al2O3. The enhanced nucleation is found to be dependent on the thin film deposition temperature.

Comments

SJSU users: Use the following link to login and access the articles via SJSU databases.This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and AIP Publishing. This article appeared in Applied Physics Letter, volume 104, 2014, and may be found at https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4869149© 2014, AIP Publishing LLC.

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