Protecting the properties of monolayer MoS2 on silicon based substrates with an atomically thin buffer

Semiconducting 2D materials, like transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), have gained much attention for their potential in opto-electronic devices, valleytronic schemes and semi-conducting to metallic phase engineering. However, like graphene and other atomically thin materials, they lose key properties when placed on a substrate like silicon, including quenching of photoluminescence, distorted crystalline structure and rough surface morphology. The ability to protect these properties of monolayer TMDs, such as molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), on standard Si-based substrates, will enable their use in opto-electronic devices and scientific investigations. Here we show that an atomically thin buffer layer of hexagonal-boron nitride (hBN) protects the range of key opto-electronic, structural and morphological properties of monolayer MoS2 on Si-based substrates. The hBN buffer restores sharp diffraction patterns, improves monolayer flatness by nearly two-orders of magnitude and causes over an order of magnitude enhancement in photoluminescence, compared to bare Si and SiO2 substrates. Our demonstration provides a way of integrating MoS2 and other 2D monolayers onto standard Si-substrates, thus furthering their technological applications and scientific investigations.