Nano-ARPES Studies of Novel Transition Metal Dichalcogenides

An Overseas Travel Grant is sought to cover travel costs to carry out the first X-ray experiments on two new two-dimensional layered semiconductor materials (ReS2 and ReSe2) over the next six months, using the high intensity X-ray beam available at the SOLEIL synchrotron, Paris. This synchrotron is unique world-wide at present in providing a high intensity, tunable X-ray wavelength, and a focused spot which is sufficiently small that we can image and target regions of of the sample consisting of single atomic layers or multiple layers at will, thus enabling us to find out how the semiconductor properties change as the thickness increases from the ultimate 2D limit up to the 3D bulk crystal behaviour. This is a new type of experimental work for the Bath group but is part of a very exciting new research direction that it is pursuing, and its studies of ReS2 and ReSe2 by other means have attracted significant attention.