Epitaxial growth of wafer-scale molybdenum disulfide semiconductor single crystals on sapphire

Two-dimensional (2D) semiconductors, in particular transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs), have attracted great interest in extending Moore's law beyond silicon 1-3 . However, despite extensive efforts 4-25 , the growth of wafer-scale TMDC single crystals on scalable and industry-compatible substrates has not been well demonstrated. Here we demonstrate the epitaxial growth of 2 inch (~50 mm) monolayer molybdenum disulfide (MoS 2 ) single crystals on a C-plane sapphire. We designed the miscut orientation towards the A axis (C/A) of sapphire, which is perpendicular to the standard substrates. Although the change of miscut orientation does not affect the epitaxial relationship, the resulting step edges break the degeneracy of nucleation energy for the antiparallel MoS 2 domains and lead to more than a…