Ting
Wen
,
Maodi
Zhang
,
Jing
Li
,
Chenyin
Jiao
,
Shenghai
Pei
,
Zenghui
Wang
* and
Juan
Xia
*
Institute of Fundamental and Frontier Sciences, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 610054, China. E-mail: zenghui.wang@uestc.edu.cn; juanxia@uestc.edu.cn
First published on 7th February 2023
We report an in situ high-pressure (0–30.24 GPa) optical study of the 2D ReS2 crystal under four specific configurations of sample orientation and laser polarization. Unlike the horizontal measurement configuration that has been widely used, under the vertical sample configuration we observe the anomalous disappearance behavior of Raman modes. Through analyzing the peak evolution under different configurations with tensor calculations, we identify the effect of pressure on different components in the full 3 × 3 Raman tensor of the anisotropic ReS2 crystal. These results provide new evidence on the remarkable tunability of pressure engineering on the crystal structure, and our methods offer an additional degree of freedom for studying pressure engineering on 2D anisotropic materials.
New conceptsIn this manuscript, we report an in situ high-pressure (0–30.24 GPa) optical study of the 2D ReS2 crystal under four specific configurations of sample orientation and laser polarization. For the first time, we observe the anomalous disappearance behavior of Raman modes under the vertical sample configuration, unlike the horizontal measurement configuration that has been widely used so far. Through analyzing the peak evolution under different configurations with tensor calculations, we successfully identify the effect of pressure on individual components in the full 3 × 3 Raman tensor of the anisotropic ReS2 crystal, which is unachievable via typical polarized measurements that can only resolve the reduced 2 × 2 tensor. These results provide new evidence on the remarkable tunability of pressure engineering on the crystal structure, and our methods offer an additional degree of freedom for studying pressure engineering on 2D anisotropic materials. We believe that this work will be of broad and great interest, and will have an important impact in the areas of material anisotropy, 2D crystals, pressure engineering, phase transitions and Raman spectroscopy. |
The strong anisotropy in the ReS2 crystal has prompted extensive polarized Raman studies and theoretical analysis focusing on the in-plane orientation.7,8 For example, in-plane optical and thermoelectric anisotropy have been widely investigated in ReS2 crystals.8–11 By contrast, researchers have rarely explored anisotropy in ReS2 crystals with the out-of-plane orientation, which could potentially give rise to attractive phenomena and delicate physics.12,13
Meanwhile, pressure engineering is highly effective for tuning the symmetry and anisotropy in 2D crystals, and has led to the observation of intriguing physics such as phase transitions,12 2D–3D structure transitions,14 metallization,15 and superconductivity.16 In particular, pressure-induced anisotropy enhancement in ReS2 crystals has recently been demonstrated.17 However, studies on the pressure engineering of ReS2 using the out-of-plane orientation have remained elusive, and such studies could potentially reveal previously unobserved phenomena, leading to a deeper understanding of the underlying physics.
In our study, we report a high-pressure (0–30.24 GPa) study of the structural, electronic and optical properties of the 2D ReS2 crystal, with both in-plane and out-of-plane orientations and different laser polarizations. We observe a clear dependence of the Raman modes on the orientation–polarization configurations, revealing the importance of orientation on the phase transition features, and the unique effects of the phase transition on the individual Raman modes. Our findings unveil the effect of pressure on all the components in the full 3 × 3 tensor. Such a technique provides a new degree of freedom for studying the pressure engineering of 2D anisotropic materials.
Fig. 2c shows the Raman spectra measured under ambient pressure for the four configurations, in which we observe 18 Raman modes. The low-symmetry parallelogram feature of Re4 clusters in the ReS2 crystal gives rise to 36 phonon modes, with the irreducible representations written as Γ = 18(Ag + Au).19,20 The 18 Au modes consist of 15 infrared-active modes and 3 acoustic Au modes, which are all Raman-inactive.21 All 18 Ag modes are Raman-active and detectable.18,21 The vibrational frequency of the 18 Ag modes is within the range of 100–450 cm−1, where the 6 peaks below 250 cm−1 with a higher intensity are assigned to the lattice vibrations related to Re atoms,7,18 and the other modes (above 250 cm−1) originate from the vibration of sulfur atoms. From our previous study,13 we denote those modes with larger weights of in-plane (out-of-plane) vibration to be the Eg-like (Ag-like) mode.22,23 The assignment of the 18 Raman modes is summarized in Table S1 (ESI†).13
All 18 Ag Raman modes show a clear dependence on the crystal orientation and laser polarization, and are different from the orientation–polarization-insensitive PL features (Fig. S2 and S3, ESI†). The intensity differences of the Raman modes amongst the H_‖, H_⊥, V_‖ and V_⊥ configurations are determined using the classical Raman selection rule: the intensity I of a Raman-active phonon mode is determined using I ∝ |es·R·ei|2, where R is the Raman tensor, and ei and es are the polarization configurations, and thus depends on the sample orientation and laser polarization. The four configurations used in our experiment should include some of the extreme values of the Raman peak intensity, and collectively offer additional information about the Raman tensor components, and thus the vibrational nature of the modes and symmetry of the crystal.
We then studied the evolution of the Raman modes at different pressures with these four configurations. Fig. 3 shows the evolution of the Re-atom vibrations with increasing pressure (0–30.24 GPa) for the H_‖ and V_‖ configurations. In the lower pressure range, four Raman peaks at 151, 161, 211 and 236 cm−1 gradually blueshift (top blue dashed lines) and broaden as the pressure is increased, which is also observed in other TMDC materials.12,24 Upon increasing the pressure, the four peaks are then redshifted (red dashed lines), before returning to the normal blueshift (bottom blue dashed lines).
The anomalous softening behaviors of these four Raman modes originate from the octahedral distortion and lattice expansion through the layer sliding effect under high pressure,25 which are also observed in higher frequency modes corresponding to sulfur-atom vibrations (Fig. S4 and S5, ESI†). Compared with WTe2,12 and TiS3,24 which exhibit phase-transition-related redshift behavior under pressure, the Raman redshift in ReS2 is different in that it shows no discontinuities, no significant intensity weakening, and no peak disappearance in the red-shift pressure range, i.e., no first-order phase transition is observed in the Re-atom vibrations within this red-shift pressure range.
In the blue shift region, however, we do observe pressure-induced Raman peak appearance and disappearance, as indicated by the filled and open triangles in Fig. 3. Interestingly, the associated pressure values clearly depend on the sample orientation. For example, under the H_‖ configuration the appearance of peak α (Fig. 4) takes place at 3.20 GPa, while under V_‖ it becomes 5.12 GPa. The disappearance of peak 2 (Fig. 4) also shows such a difference (3.20 GPa under H_‖ vs. 9.92 GPa under V_‖).
Such a difference in the observed pressure-induced behavior depends on not only sample orientation but also the laser polarization. To obtain a comprehensive and delicate understanding of such an observed difference due to configuration, we plot in Fig. 4 the extracted Raman frequency for all 18 modes over the entire pressure range for all 4 configurations (see Fig. S4 and S5 for the full spectra, ESI†). We first examine the pressure-dependent behavior under the H configurations (Fig. 4a and b).
At 3.20 GPa, peaks 2 (Eg-like) and 14 (Ag-like) disappear, a new mode (α, at 135 cm−1) appears, and the intensity of peak 6 (Ag-like) becomes apparent, indicating a phase transition. This first phase transition corresponds to a structural transition from 1T′ to distorted-1T′ symmetry,26 which also involves an indirect-to-direct band transition as observed in the PL spectra (Fig. S3, ESI†) and confirmed via high-pressure XRD measurements.25–28 As the pressure is increased, the second phase transition is indicated by the splitting of peak 15 (Eg-like) at 11.84 GPa under the H configurations, which probably originates from distortion of the Re4 clusters and rotation of the S atoms around the Re chain.25,29
Upon further increasing the pressure, a more complicated third phase is observed between 20.00 GPa and 25.60 GPa, which starts to show clear polarization dependence: in addition to peak 1 (Ag-like) and 12 (Ag-like) disappearing at ∼20.00 GPa, peak 17 (Ag-like) disappears at 20.00 GPa for H_‖ and 25.60 GPa for H_⊥, and peak 16 (Ag-like) only disappears for H_⊥ (at 25.60 GPa). The third phase transition process is suggested to be a pressure-induced transition of atomic arrangement from disordered stacking to ordered stacking,25,29 which shows the asynchronous disappearance of Raman modes under the H_‖ and H_⊥ configurations, originating from the different elastic moduli of the ReS2 crystal along and perpendicular to the Re chain. This asynchronous behavior reflects the anisotropic change of interlayer force constants of the S atoms and thus the out-of-plane vibrations (Ag-like modes) of the S atoms.17,30–32
Unlike the H configuration, the data under the V configuration show anomalous disappearance behavior in which a large number of peaks disappear together: taking V_‖ for example, peaks 10, 11, 14, 16, and 17 vanish at ∼5.12 GPa, while peaks α, 1, 12, 13, and 15 vanish at ∼17.76 GPa; similar features are also observed under the V_⊥ configuration (details shown in Table S2, ESI†). By comparing the evolution of Raman modes under pressure between the H and V configurations, we show that the measurement configuration plays an important role in observing the Raman features associated with the phase transitions.
To better understand the origin of the difference in the mode disappearance behavior between the H and V configurations, we calculate the intensity I of these Raman modes using the classic Raman selection rule: I ∝ |es·R·ei|2. We note that the birefringence effect does not apply to these four particular configurations (H_‖, H_⊥, V_‖, V_⊥).13 The full 3 × 3 tensors (R) of the Ag-like and Eg-like modes in ReS2 are given by13:
IAg-like(H_‖) = a12, IEg-like(H_‖) = a22 + d2 | (1) |
IAg-like(H_⊥) = b12, IEg-like(H_⊥) = b22 + d2 | (2) |
IAg-like(V_‖) = a12, IEg-like(V_‖) = a22 + e2 | (3) |
IAg-like(V_⊥) = c2, IEg-like(V_⊥) = e2 | (4) |
In this case, the effect of pressure on all the tensor components of the anisotropic ReS2 crystal can be revealed: (I) For the H configuration, the continuity and stability of the vast majority of the Eg-like and Ag-like modes indicate that pressure weakly affects the value of the tensor components a1, a2, b1, b2, and d. (II) For the V configuration in the lower pressure range (0–5.12 GPa), the anomalous disappearance of a large amount of Ag peaks suggests that the pressure has a remarkable effect on the value of coefficient c in this pressure range, which dominates the out-of-plane Raman vibrations. (III) For the V configuration in the higher pressure range (above 17.76 GPa), the vanishing of both the Ag-like and Eg-like modes indicates that the pressure starts to impact a1, a2, c, and e, which are involved in both the out-of-plane and in-plane Raman vibrations detected under the V configuration.
These pressure-induced asynchronous phenomena and the specific effect on the Raman tensor elements are in good agreement with the in-plane and out-of-plane nature of the Ag and Eg modes.25,27,29 Instead of analyzing the pressure–frequency slopes of the Ag and Eg vibrations as in most high-pressure studies, we examine the vanishing of the Raman peaks under different configurations and investigate the pressure effects on individual tensor components. This gives strong experimental and theoretical evidence that lower pressures mainly modulate the out-of-plane vibrations, and higher pressures affect both the out-of-plane and in-plane vibrations. Specifically, such previously unobserved phenomena (the massive disappearance of Raman modes in the V configurations) offer a direct link to the pressure effects on individual tensor components.
Footnote |
† Electronic supplementary information (ESI) available. See DOI: https://doi.org/10.1039/d2nh00584k |
This journal is © The Royal Society of Chemistry 2023 |