Femtosecond Laser-Driven Phase Engineering of WS for Nano-Periodic Phase Patterning and Sub-ppm Ammonia Gas Sensing.

Laser-driven phase transition of 2D transition metal dichalcogenides has attracted much attention due to its high flexibility and rapidity. However, there are some limitations during the laser irradiation process, especially the unsatisfied surface ablation, the inability of nanoscale phase patterning, and the unexploited physical properties of new phase. In this work, the well-controlled femtosecond (fs) laser-driven transformation from the metallic 2M-WS to the semiconducting 2H-WS is reported, which is confirmed to be a single-crystal to single-crystal transition without layer thinning or obvious ablation.

Revisiting the Hetero-Interface of Electrolyte/2D Materials in an Electric Double Layer Device.

Electric double layer (EDL) devices based on 2D materials have made great achievements for versatile electronic and opto-electronic applications; however, the ion dynamics and electric field distribution of the EDL at the electrolyte/2D material interface and their influence on the physical properties of 2D materials have not been clearly clarified. In this work, by using Kelvin probe force microscope and steady/transient optical techniques, the character of the EDL and its influence on the optical properties of monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) are probed. The potential drop, unscreened EDL potential distribution, and accumulated carriers at the electrolyte/TMD interface are revealed, which can be explained by nonlinear Thomas-Fermi theory.

Anisotropic Signal Processing with Trigonal Selenium Nanosheet Synaptic Transistors.

Hardware implementation of an artificial neural network requires neuromorphic devices to process information with low energy consumption and high heterogeneity. Here we demonstrate an electrolyte-gated synaptic transistor (EGT) based on a trigonal selenium (-Se) nanosheet. Due to the intrinsic low conductivity of the Se channel, the -Se synaptic transistor exhibits ultralow energy consumption, less than 0.