Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
Control of doping and carrier concentration at the nanoscale is an essential requirement to realize future electronic and optoelectronic devices in two-dimensional van der Waals (vdW) heterostructures. In spite of great efforts on the related study, introducing nanoscale high-quality junctions with custom-designed sizes and sites remains an outstanding challenge in experiments. Here, we overcome the challenges by combining scanning tunneling microscope (STM) lithography with structural phase transition of transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs). Our experiments demonstrate that nanoscale TMD islands can be created, moved, sliced, and merged at the interface of graphene/TMD heterostructures by using a STM tip. The reported method can in situ introduce the structural phase transition in the interfacial TMD islands, generating well-defined nanoscale electrostatic potentials in graphene and enabling the realization of custom-designed artificial model systems. Our result enables the creation of high-quality patterned quantum confined systems to fully engineer electronic and optoelectronic properties of vdW heterostructures.
Ren et al. (Thu,) studied this question.