The electronic transport properties of transition-metal dichalcogenide lateral heterojunctions†
Abstract
Two-dimensional (2D) heteromaterials have aroused a new interest in many applications, and have emerged as a unique family of nanomaterials in physics and materials science. Recently, vertical and in-plane heterostructures of MoS2–WS2 monolayers, were successively prepared and observed in experiments [Gong et al., Nat. Mater., 2014, 13, 1135]. Herein, using a first-principles technique, we study the electronic transport properties of several types of zigzag MoS2–WS2 lateral heterojunctions. The results demonstrate that the MoS2–WS2 lateral heterojunctions show an interesting negative differential resistive (NDR) effect, due to owning very similar band structures to that of the pristine MoS2 and WS2 nanoribbons. The electrons always propagate through the heterojunctions along the metal-terminations, while never along the S-termination. The results demonstrate that our proposed transition-metal dichalcogenide (TMD) heterojunctions could become candidates of NDR devices, and have potential applications in nanoelectronics.