pssRRL accepted: Coulomb Blockade Spectroscopy of a MoS2 Nanotube

We are happy to be able to announce that our manuscript "Coulomb Blockade Spectroscopy of a MoS₂ Nanotube" has been accepted for publication by pssRRL Rapid Research Letters.

Everybody is talking about novel semiconductor materials, and in particular the transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs), "layer materials" similar to graphene. With a chemical composition of TX₂, where the transition metal T is, e.g., tungsten W or molybdenum Mo, and the chalcogenide X is, e.g., sulphur S or selenium Se, a wide range of interesting properties is expected.

What's by far not so well known is that many of these materials also form  nanotubes, similar to carbon nanotubes in structure but with distinct properties inherited from the planar system. Here, we present first low temperature transport measurements on a quantum dot in a MoS₂ nanotube. The metallic contacts to the nanotube still require a lot of improvements, but the  nanotube between them acts as clean potential well for electrons.

Also, our measurements show possible traces of quantum confined behaviour. This is something that has not been achieved yet in planar, lithographically designed devices - since these have by their very geometric nature larger length scales. It means that via transport spectroscopy we can learn about the material properties and its suitability for quantum electronics devices.

A lot of complex physical phenomena have been predicted for MoS₂, including spin filtering and intrinsic, possibly topologic superconductivity - a topic of high interest for the quantum computing community, where larger semiconductor nanowires are used at the moment. So this is the start of an exciting project!

"Coulomb Blockade Spectroscopy of a MoS₂ Nanotube"
S. Reinhardt, L. Pirker, C. Bäuml, M. Remskar, and A. K. Hüttel
Physica Status Solidi RRL, doi:10.1002/pssr.201900251 (2019); arXiv:1904.05972 (PDF)