We report how the presence of electron-beam-induced sulfur vacancies affects first-order Raman modes and correlate the effects with the evolution of the in situ transmission-electron microscopy two-terminal conductivity of monolayer MoS2 under electron irradiation. We observe a red-shift in the E′ Raman peak and a less pronounced blue-shift in the A′1 peak with increasing electron dose. Using energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy and selected-area electron diffraction, we show that irradiation causes partial removal of sulfur and correlate the dependence of the Raman peak shifts with S vacancy density (a few %). This allows us to quantitatively correlate the frequency shifts with vacancy concentration, as rationalized by first-principles density functional theory calculations. In situ device current measurements show an exponential decrease in channel current upon irradiation. Our analysis demonstrates that the observed frequency shifts are intrinsic properties of the defective systems and that Raman spectroscopy can be used as a quantitative diagnostic tool to characterize MoS2-based transport channels.

In the last two decades, new techniques that monitor ionic current modulations as single molecules pass through a nanoscale pore have enabled numerous single-molecule studies. While biological nanopores have recently shown the ability to resolve single nucleotides within individual DNA molecules, similar developments with solid-state nanopores have lagged, due to challenges both in fabricating stable nanopores of similar dimensions as biological nanopores and in achieving sufficiently low-noise and high-bandwidth recordings. Here we show that small silicon nitride nanopores (0.8 to 2-nm-diameter in 5 to 8-nm-thick membranes) can resolve differences between ionic current signals produced by short (30 base) ssDNA homopolymers (poly(dA), poly(dC), poly(dT)), when combined with measurement electronics that allow a signal-to-noise ratio of better than 10 to be achieved at 1 MHz bandwidth. While identifying intramolecular DNA sequences with silicon nitride nanopores will require further improvements in nanopore sensitivity and noise levels, homopolymer differentiation represents an important milestone in the development of solid-state nanopores.

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