APL Materials (May 2018)

Accelerated carrier recombination by grain boundary/edge defects in MBE grown transition metal dichalcogenides

  • Ke Chen,
  • Anupam Roy,
  • Amritesh Rai,
  • Hema C. P. Movva,
  • Xianghai Meng,
  • Feng He,
  • Sanjay K. Banerjee,
  • Yaguo Wang

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5022339
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 6, no. 5
pp. 056103 – 056103-7

Abstract

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Defect-carrier interaction in transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) plays important roles in carrier relaxation dynamics and carrier transport, which determines the performance of electronic devices. With femtosecond laser time-resolved spectroscopy, we investigated the effect of grain boundary/edge defects on the ultrafast dynamics of photoexcited carrier in molecular beam epitaxy (MBE)-grown MoTe2 and MoSe2. We found that, comparing with exfoliated samples, the carrier recombination rate in MBE-grown samples accelerates by about 50 times. We attribute this striking difference to the existence of abundant grain boundary/edge defects in MBE-grown samples, which can serve as effective recombination centers for the photoexcited carriers. We also observed coherent acoustic phonons in both exfoliated and MBE-grown MoTe2, indicating strong electron-phonon coupling in this materials. Our measured sound velocity agrees well with the previously reported result of theoretical calculation. Our findings provide a useful reference for the fundamental parameters: carrier lifetime and sound velocity and reveal the undiscovered carrier recombination effect of grain boundary/edge defects, both of which will facilitate the defect engineering in TMD materials for high speed opto-electronics.