Measurement of mechanical properties of phase transformed 1T MoS2 using atomic force microscopy

It has been several years since graphene, which is the first 2D material, was revealed into the world. Still many of fundamental properties of 2D materials have not been clearly identified. Especially the experiment for measurement of mechanical properties of 2D materials is hard to design, fabricate or measure by traditional methods which have been adaptively developed for macro-scale experiments.

Molybdenum disulfide(MoS2) is an attractive material having interesting electronic properties and generally have 2H structure, which exhibits semiconducting behavior. The 2H structure can be transformed to 1T structure, which shows metallic behavior via some methods. There are several experimental results about mechanical properties of 2H MoS2. However, for 1T structure, only computational calculations exist due to its difficulty of the sample fabrication.

Here, we introduce our experimental process to make suspended 1T MoS2 on circular holes and its mechanical property measurement results. We tried to properly combine the existing techniques from previous research about 2D material and finally succeed to fabricate suspended 1T MoS2 on holes and its properties have been accurately characterized using the AFM indentation method.