Scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy of monolayer nickel ditelluride on gold

The wide breadth of electronic and optical properties of two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenides (2D-TMDs) have made them an attractive materials system for research and promising for commercial application. The TMD nickel ditelluride (NiTe2) is of particular interest because it is predicted to have spin-polarized electronic states and Dirac nodes near the Fermi level. While the atomic structure of monolayer NiTe2 is well studied, its electronic structure is not well characterized experimentally. In this study, we characterize the electronic local density of states using scanning tunneling spectroscopy (STS) correlated with atomic structure on mechanically exfoliated monolayer NiTe2 on gold and compare to our previous results on bulk NiTe2.