Monolayer behaviour in bulk ReS2 due to electronic and.pdfVIP

ARTICLE Received 27 Aug 2013 | Accepted 13 Jan 2014 | Published 6 Feb 2014 DOI: 10.1038/ncomms4252 Monolayer behaviour in bulk ReS2 due to electronic and vibrational decoupling 1,2 3 2 2 2,4 2 1,2 Sefaattin Tongay , Hasan Sahin , Changhyun Ko , Alex Luce , Wen Fan , Kai Liu , Jian Zhou , 5 5 6 7 7 4 1 Ying-Sheng Huang , Ching-Hwa Ho , Jinyuan Yan , D. Frank Ogletree , Shaul Aloni , Jie Ji , Shushen Li , Jingbo Li1, F.M. Peeters3 Junqiao Wu1,2,8 Semiconducting transition metal dichalcogenides consist of monolayers held together by weak forces where the layers are electronically and vibrationally coupled. Isolated monolayers show changes in electronic structure and lattice vibration energies, including a transition from indirect to direct bandgap. Here we present a new member of the family, rhenium disulphide (ReS2), where such variation is absent and bulk behaves as electronically and vibrationally decoupled monolayers stacked together. From bulk to monolayers, ReS2 remains direct bandgap and its Raman spectrum shows no dependence on the number of layers. Interlayer decoupling is further demonstrated by the insensitivity of the optical absorption and Raman spectrum to interlayer distance modulated by hydrostatic pressure. Theoretical calculations attribute the decoupling to Peierls distortion of the 1T structure of ReS2, which prevents ordered stacking and minimizes the interlayer overlap of wavefunctions. Such vanishing interlayer coupling enables probing of two-dimensional-like systems without the need for monolayers. 1 State Key Laboratory of Superlat