Considerations for Utilizing Sodium Chloride in Epitaxial Molybdenum Disulfide

The utilization of alkali salts, such as NaCl and KI, has enabled the successful growth of large single domain and fully coalesced polycrystalline two-dimensional (2D) transition-metal dichalcogenide layers. However, the impact of alkali salts on photonic and electronic properties is not fully established. In this work, we report alkali-free epitaxy of MoS₂ on sapphire and benchmark the properties against alkali-assisted growth of MoS₂. This study demonstrates that although NaCl can dramatically increase the domain size of monolayer MoS₂ by 20 times, it can also induce strong optical and electronic heterogeneities in as-grown, large-scale films. This work elucidates that utilization of NaCl can lead to variation in growth rates, loss of epitaxy, and high density of nanoscale MoS₂ particles (4 ± 0.7/μm²). Such phenomena suggest that alkali atoms play an important role in Mo and S adatom mobility and strongly influence the 2D/sapphire interface during growth. Compared to alkali-free synthesis under the same growth conditions, MoS₂ growth assisted by NaCl results in >1% tensile strain in as-grown domains, which reduces photoluminescence by ∼20× and degrades transistor performance.