Percolative phase transition in few-layered MoSe2 Field-effect transistors using Co and Cr contacts

Abstract

The metal-to-insulator phase transition (MIT) in two-dimensional (2D) materials under the influence of a gating electric field has revealed interesting electronic behavior and the need for a deeper fundamental understanding of electron transport processes, while attracting great interest on the development of next-generation electronic and optoelectronic devices. Although the mechanism of the MIT in 2D semiconductors is a topic under debate in condensed matter physics, our work demonstrate the tunable percolative phase transition in few-layered MoSe₂ field-effect transistors (FET)using different metallic contact materials. Here, we attempted to understand the MIT through temperature-dependent electronic transport measurements by tuning the carrier density in MoSe₂ channel under the influence of applied gate voltage. In particular, we have examined this phenomenon using the conventional chromium (Cr) and ferromagnetic cobalt (Co) as two metal contacts. For both Cr and Co, our devices demonstrated an n-type behavior with a room-temperature field-effect mobility of 16 cm²V^-1s^-1 for the device with Cr contacts and 92 cm²V^-1s^-1, respectively. At low temperature measurements of 50K, the mobilities increased significantly to 65 cm²V^-1s^-1 for Cr and 394 cm²V^-1s^-1 for the device with Co contacts. By fitting our experimental data to the percolative phase transition theory, the temperature-dependent conductivity data shows a transition from an insulating-to-metallic behavior at a bias of ~28 V for Cr contacts and ~20 V for Co contacts. This cross-over of the conductivity can be attributed to increasing carrier density as a function of gate bias in the temperature-dependent transfer characteristics. By extracting the critical exponents, we find that the transport behavior in device with Co contacts aligns closely with the 2D percolation theory. In contrast, the devices with Cr-contacted deviate significantly from the 2D limit at low temperatures.