Van der Waals epitaxy of Weyl-semimetal Td-WTe2
Résumé
Epitaxial growth of WTe2 offers significant advantages, including the production of high-quality
films, possible long range in-plane ordering and precise control over layer thicknesses. However,
the mean island size of WTe2 grown by molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) in litterature is only a few
tens of nanometers, which is not suitable for an implementation of devices at large lateral scales.
Here we report the growth of Td -WTe2 ultrathin films by MBE on monolayer (ML) graphene
reaching a mean flake size of ≃110nm, which is, on overage, more than three time larger than
previous results. WTe2 films thicker than 5nm have been successfully synthesized and exhibit the
expected Td-phase atomic structure. We rationalize epitaxial growth of Td-WTe2 and propose a
simple model to estimate the mean flake size as a function of growth parameters that can be applied
to other transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs). Based on nucleation theory and Kolmogorov-
Johnson-Meh-Avrami (KJMA) equation, our analytical model supports experimental data showing
a critical coverage of 0.13ML above which WTe2 nucleation becomes negligible. The quality of
monolayer WTe2 films is demonstrated from electronic band structure analysis using angle-
resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) in agreement with first-principle calculations
performed on free-standing WTe2 and previous reports.
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