Growth of Complex 2D Material-Based Structures with Naturally Formed Contacts.

The difficulty of processing two-dimensional (2D) transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) materials into working devices with any scalability is one of the largest impediments to capitalizing on their industrial promise. Here, we describe a versatile, simple, and scalable technique to directly grow self-contacted thin-film materials over a range of TMDs (MoS, MoSe, WS, and WSe), where predeposited bulk metallic contacts serve as the nucleation site for the TMD material to grow, forming naturally contacted device structures in a single step. The conditions for growth as well as optical and physical properties are reported.