tungsten selenide is a gray crystal with molecular formula WSe2. This semiconductor material has the potential to absorb and convert a large proportion of incident light into electricity. It consists of upper and lower layers of selenium atoms connected to tungsten atoms in between.
Like graphene, tungsten selenide has high transparency and is an excellent electrical conductor. This material is also an effective insulator and has a wide range of other useful properties. It can be used in solar cells, light-emitting diodes (LEDs), photocatalysis, phtotovoltaics, gas sensing and electronics. Stanford Advanced Materials (SAM) offers high-quality tungsten selenide with competitive pricing.
Compared to other transition metal dichalcogenides, tungsten selenide is relatively easy to grow. However, growing two-dimensional tungsten selenide using chemical vapor deposition requires a constant flow of tungsten ions in the vapor phase. This is difficult to achieve without an expensive high-pressure sputter system.
In the new work, researchers from the National University of Singapore and the National Institute for Materials Science in Ibaraki, Japan, have discovered a way to overcome this obstacle by using alkali metal halides as growth promoters. This approach allows them to grow tungsten selenide in a continuous flow, which significantly reduces the processing cost and yield.
In addition, tungsten diselenide has the unique property of being ambipolar – it can be n- or p-doped to make a single-layer FET with superior performance. This new study demonstrated that a WSe2 monolayer anchored on g-C3N4 can serve as a highly efficient co-catalyst for H2O2 production by photo-induced water oxidation, with enhanced hole and electron mobilities up to 107 and 26 cm2 V-1 s-1 respectively.