One suitable platform is a monolayer molybdenum disulfide semiconductor. An electrostatic accumulation gate supplies conduction electrons whose motion is confined to the atomic sheet; source and drain contacts act as reservoirs. A clean insulating substrate and dielectric or encapsulation reduce disorder and prevent gate leakage. Two split gates deplete the adjacent sheet and leave a narrow conducting gap, thereby confining the in-plane transverse direction while retaining transport along the gap.
Apply a small source-drain voltage, measure the current and determine linear-response conductance while tuning the split-gate voltage and carrier density. A graphene sheet is another two-dimensional carrier system, but its lack of an ordinary gap complicates purely electrostatic confinement; etched boundaries or a suitable gapped architecture may be needed. A two-dimensional material does not by itself guarantee ballistic transport or resolved subbands.[ref]
Split-gated point-contact in MoS2-hBN structures by Chithra H. Sharma and Madhu Thalakulam. Electrostatic confinement in a two-dimensional semiconductor platform
In atomic layer deposition, expose the surface to a molybdenum precursor, purge unreacted precursor and volatile products, expose it to a sulfur reactant, and purge again. Each half-reaction should saturate the available reactive sites rather than continue indefinitely with dose. Repetition builds a molybdenum disulfide film, with nucleation, incubation and layer closure checked independently.
Self-limited surface chemistry is not the same as depositing exactly one complete crystal monolayer per cycle. A cycle may add only a fraction of a layer, and initially isolated islands can thicken before all bare substrate is covered. Reactions on hydroxylated silicon dioxide can also differ from those on the comparatively inert MoS basal surface. A precursor pair must actually show saturation under the chosen conditions; simply alternating gases is insufficient evidence of ALD.
In metalorganic chemical vapor deposition, metalorganic and sulfur-containing precursors are typically supplied simultaneously or with overlapping residence times, and film growth depends on decomposition, transport and surface reaction rates. Both methods involve chemistry, but ALD separates saturating half-reactions and purge steps. An ALD process need not use a metalorganic precursor, and pulsed CVD is not automatically ALD.
