Necessary Interface Characteristics for Elecronic Growth on Layered Dichalcogenides

Under very specific conditions of metallic film growth, the electronic characteistics of the metal can play a deciding role in determing the structural properties of the film. This electronic growth, which can be harnessed to create self assembled quantized nanostructures or films of discrete thickness, is quite uncommon. Normally, electronic energy considerations are quite weak compareed to standard growth paramteres like straing, bonding energies, surface mobility, and surface free energy. In recent years, we hace discovered that certain metals will exhibit electronic growth when deposited upon the surfaces of layered dichalcogenides. The electrnic growth can occur well above room temperature, showing a high defree of stability even though lattice mismatch in these systems is about 10%. We have cplored different characterstics related to bonding conditions for different metals and substrates to their growth properites. We find that a high degree of surface mobility is a good indicator for potential electronic growth, and that the bonding site is also important. In adddition to mobility, we believe that having a small energy difference between multiple surface bonding sites is also important for alleviating strain to enable electrnic growth. Some level of disorder at the interface layer seems seems to minimize the total energy so that the metal films can achieve bulk-like configurations even at nanometer scale thicknessses. This work can be used to spontaneously create nanostructures or thin films for use in catalysis or as substrates for the study of self assembled monolayer systems or surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy.