PL enhancement of MoS2 by Au nanoparticles

Abstract

Molybdenum disulphide (MoS2), a layered quasi-two dimensional (2D) chalcogenide material, is a subject of intense research because of its electronic, optical, mechanical and physicochemical properties. Since the monolayer MoS2 is a direct-gap seminconductor, it is widely used in the field of light-emitting area. However, its photoluminescence (PL) efficiency is very low due to excessive doping in monolayer MoS2 and rich non-radiative centers. In this letter, we reportits synthesis using the gold nanoparticles which have a resonance absorption peak around 514 nm. The gold nanoparticles are dispersed on the surface of the MoS2 samples by means of spin-coating. Then, we measure the photoluminescence (PL) of the monolayer, bilayer and multilayer samples before and after the spin-coating, and find a great enhancement in the PL intensity of the monolayer sample. Also the PL intensities of bi-layer and multiple layer MoS2 samples are slightly enhanced. Our work shows that gold nanoparticles may impose an obvious p-doping effect to the monolayer and bi-layer MoS2 samples to enhance the PL, and a surface plasmon polariton effect of the gold nanoparticles is also a positive factor for the enhancement.