Pressure-mediated contact quality improvement between monolayer MoS₂ and graphite

Two-dimensional (2D) materials and their heterostructures have attracted a lot of attention due to their unique electronic and optical properties. MoS₂ as the most typical 2D semiconductors has great application potential in thin film transistors, photodetector, hydrogen evolution reaction, memory device, etc. However, the performance of MoS₂ devices is limited by the contact resistance and the improvement of its contact quality is important. In this work, we report the experimental investigation of pressure-enhanced contact quality between monolayer MoS₂ and graphite by conductive atom force microscope (C-AFM). It was found that at high pressure, the contact quality between graphite and MoS₂ is significantly improved. This pressure-mediated contact quality improvement between MoS₂ and graphite comes from the enhanced charge transfer between MoS₂ and graphite when MoS₂ is stretched. Our results provide a new way to enhance the contact quality between MoS₂ and graphite for further applications.