Studies on transport properties of copper doped tungsten diselenide single crystals

During recent years, transition metal dichalcogenides of groups IVB, VB and VIB have received considerable attention because of the great diversity in their transport properties. 2H-WSe2 (Tungsten diselenide) is an interesting member of the transition metal dichalcogenide (TMDC's) family and known to be a semiconductor useful for photovoltaic and optoelectronic applications. The anisotropy usually observed in this diamagnetic semiconductor material is a result of the sandwich structure of Se-W-Se layers interacting with each other, loosely bonded by the weak Van der Waals forces. Recent efforts in studying the influence of the anisotropic electrical and optical properties of this layered-type transition metal dichalcogenides have been implemented by doping the samples with different alkali group elements. Unfortunately, little work is reported on doping of metals in WSe2. Therefore, it is proposed in this work to carry out a systematic growth of single crystals of WSe2 by doping it with copper in different proportions i.e. CuxWSe2 (x=0, 0.5, 1.0) by direct vapour transport technique. Transport properties like low and high temperature resistivity measurements, high pressure resistivity, Seebeck coefficient measurements at low temperature and Hall Effect at room temperature were studied in detail on all these samples. These measurements show that tungsten diselenide single crystals are p-type whereas doped with copper makes it n-type in nature. The results obtained and their implications are discussed in this paper. (C) 2011 Published by Elsevier B.V.