Direct growth of vertical MoS₂ Dendrites by Metal Organic Chemical Vapor Deposition

MoS₂ has been demonstrated to be a very promising material in wide variety of applications including nano-electronics, optoelectronics, solar cells, sensors, catalytic applications and so on. However, Controlled growth orientation of MoS₂ thin films is the key requirement to realize their vast number of applications, as material has strong anisotropic properties, in addition chemically active edge sites over inert in-plane MoS₂ flakes is more important for catalytic activities. Thermodynamically, growth of inert in-plane MoS2 is preferred due to less number of active sites on its surface over the edge-sites MoS₂ and that making vertical growth difficult task. Here, we demonstrate for first time the chemical vapor deposition (CVD) of vertically standing molybdenum disulfide (MoS₂) dendrites, with an combination of Molybdenum hexacarbonyl (Mo(CO)₆) and Dimethyl disulfide (C₂H₆S₂) as the novel kind of Mo and S precursors, respectively.

MoS₂ dendrites is a new type of MoS₂ material, SEM and TEM results demonstrated the vertically oriented growth and structure has a tree-like crystal structure with high density of edge terminated MoS₂. Moreover, leaves of those trees has sizes as small as10 nm and consist of MoS₂ few atomics layers . While Raman confirm MoS₂ quality of sheets with 3-4 layers. On optical properties side of dendrites , structure has high absorption cover all visible range of light and strong photoluminescence with wide peak centered around green light due to quantum confinement .

These dendrites usually have unique physical and chemical properties, making them promising for range wide applications in many fields.