MoS2 and other semiconducting transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) are of great interest due to their excellent physical properties and versatile chemistry. Although many recent research efforts have been directed to explore attractive properties associated with MoS2 monolayers, multilayer/few-layer MoS2 structures are indeed demanded by many practical scale-up device applications, because multilayer structures can provide sizable electronic/photonic state densities for driving upscalable electrical/optical signals. Currently there is a lack of processes capable of producing ordered, pristine multilayer structures of MoS2 (or other relevant TMDCs) with manufacturing-grade uniformity of thicknesses and electronic/photonic properties. In this article, we present a nanoimprint-based approach toward addressing this challenge. In this approach, termed as nanoimprint-assisted shear exfoliation (NASE), a prepatterned bulk MoS2 stamp is pressed into a polymeric fixing layer, and the imprinted MoS2 features are exfoliated along a shear direction. This shear exfoliation can significantly enhance the exfoliation efficiency and thickness uniformity of exfoliated flakes in comparison with previously reported exfoliation processes. Furthermore, we have preliminarily demonstrated the fabrication of multiple transistors and biosensors exhibiting excellent device-to-device performance consistency. Finally, we present a molecular dynamics modeling analysis of the scaling behavior of NASE. This work holds significant potential to leverage the superior properties of MoS2 and other emerging TMDCs for practical scale-up device applications.

We experimentally identify two different physics principles for operating MoS2 transistor biosensors, which depend on antibody functionalization locations. If antibodies are functionalized on an insulating layer coated on a MoS2 transistor, antibody-antigen binding events mainly modify the transistor threshold voltage, which can be explained by the conventional capacitor model. If antibodies are directly grafted on the MoS2 transistor channel, the binding events mainly modulate the ON-state transconductance of the transistor, which is attributed to the antigen-induced disordered potential in the MoS2 channel. This work advances the device physics for simplifying the transistor biosensor structures targeting for femtomolar-level quantification of biomolecules.

Four novel ternary Zintl phase compounds belonging to the Ca11–x ­RE x ­Sb10–y (RE = La, Ce, Nd, Sm; 0.18(4) ≤ x ≤ 0.43(2), 0.14(1) ≤ y ≤ 0.41(1)) system have been synthesized by arc-melting, and the Ho11Ge10-type crystal structure has been characterized for the isotypic title compounds by both powder and single crystal X-ray diffraction analyses. The intrinsically complex crystal structure is viewed as an assembly of the three distinctively shaped cationic polyhedra built from either seven or nine cations and the anionic frameworks constructed by the “dumbbell-shaped” Sb2 and the “square-shaped” Sb4 moieties. All of the four trivalent rare-earth metals were successfully introduced as n-type dopants to partially substitute divalent Ca atoms in the parental compound Ca11Sb10, which resulted in generating two or three Ca2+/RE3+ mixed-cationic sites. In particular, during these substitutions, we observed a unique site preference of Ca2+ and RE3+ among four available cationic sites, where the rare-earth metals with the higher electronegativities than Ca occupied particular atomic sites having the higher Q values. This type of site preference was conclusively explained by theoretical investigations using the tight-binding linear muffin-tin orbital method. Despite the successful n-type doping, the increased electrical conductivities σ and the decreased Seebeck coefficients S of Ca10.75(3)­Nd0.25­Sb9.82(1) and Ca10.82(4)­Sm0.18­Sb9.86(1) compared to those of Ca11Sb10 still presented the p-type rather than n-type characters. These unexpected behaviors should be attributed to ca. 7–20% of Sb3 deficiencies found at the “square-site” (Wyckoff 8h), which spontaneously occurred to reduce an energetically unfavorable antibonding character of the interatomic interaction between two Sb3 atoms at the square-site. Total and partial density of states of a hypothetical structural model Ca10.5­Nd0.5­Sb10, an SEM image of single crystals of Ca10.57(2)­La0.43­Sb9.59(1), and a TGA result of Ca10.82(4)­Sm0.18­Sb9.86(1) are also provided.

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