Patterning metal contacts and dopants on two-dimensional materials by thermal scanning probe lithography

Two-dimensional (2D) materials are attracting significant interests in the nanoelectronics community due to their various electrical properties, atomic-scale thickness, and mechanical flexibility. The current challenge to fabricate high performance 2D materials-based electronic devices is the poor quality of the metal contacts, the difficulty to pattern dopants, and the high fabrication cost. To overcome these challenges, here, we show that using thermal scanning probe lithography (t-SPL), record performing high-quality metal contacts can be fabricated cost-effectively on 2D materials, resulting in high performance 2D materials-based field effect transistors. Moreover, we show that by integrating t-SPL with a gas flow chamber, t-SPL can be used to achieve nanoscale bipolar doping of 2D materials. This t-SPL method opens a new way to cost-effectively fabricate high performance 2D materials-based nanoelectronic devices and can be easily scaled up using parallel probe arrays.