Heteroepitaxial van der Waals semiconductor superlattices

Abstract We report atomic layer-by-layer epitaxial growth of van der Waals (vdW) semiconductor superlattices (SLs) with programmable stacking periodicities, composed of more than two kinds of dissimilar transition-metal dichalcogenide monolayers (MLs), such as MoS2, WS2 and WSe2. The kinetics-controlled vdW epitaxy in the near equilibrium limit by metalorganic chemical vapour depositions enables to achieve accurate ML-by-ML stacking, free of interlayer atomic mixing, resulting in the tunable two-dimensional (2D) vdW electronic systems. We identified coherent atomic stacking orders at the vdW heterointerfaces, and present scaling valley polarized optical excitations that only pertain to a series of 2D type II band alignments.