Water-Assisted Concerted Layer Growth of Td-Phase WTe2for Nonlinear Hall Effect and Microwave Rectification

Shuang Wu; Yu Fei Liu; Sun Yong Kwon; Ting Yong Lim; Sinchul Yeom; Anyuan Gao; Houchen Li; Raymond R. Unocic; Alina Mary Varghese; Edgar Lopez-Torres; Kai Xiao; Tay Rong Chang; Mina Yoon; Su Yang Xu; Xufan Li

doi:10.1021/acs.nanolett.5c05085

Water-Assisted Concerted Layer Growth of T_d-Phase WTe₂for Nonlinear Hall Effect and Microwave Rectification

Shuang Wu
, Yu Fei Liu
, Sun Yong Kwon
, Ting Yong Lim
, Sinchul Yeom
, Anyuan Gao
, Houchen Li
, Raymond R. Unocic
, Alina Mary Varghese
, Edgar Lopez-Torres
, Kai Xiao
, Tay Rong Chang
, Mina Yoon
, Su Yang Xu
, Xufan Li

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

The T_d phase of tungsten ditelluride (WTe₂), a noncentrosymmetric transition metal dichalcogenide, hosts rich correlated phenomena, topological states, and nonlinear transport responses. However, the scalable synthesis of high-quality few-layer WTe₂ with precise layer control remains challenging. Here, we report a water-assisted chemical vapor deposition approach that deterministically grows monolayer to trilayer T_d-WTe₂ with controlled flake size and density. Moisture-mediated precursor liquefaction through salt-assisted intermediates enables vapor–liquid–solid growth and tunable layer numbers through a concerted layer growth mode. Transport studies reveal that trilayer WTe₂ exhibits a nonlinear Hall effect susceptibility of 1.1 μm·V^–1 at 10 K and 0.5 μm·V^–1 at 50 K, nearly an order of magnitude higher than that in bilayers, consistent with the calculated Berry curvature dipole enhancement. Layer-dependent microwave rectification further highlights the influence of topological band structure and interlayer coupling. These results establish layer-engineered T_d-WTe₂ as a promising platform for nonlinear quantum transport and high-frequency optoelectronic applications.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	17475-17484
Number of pages	10
Journal	Nano Letters
Volume	25
Issue number	50
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.nanolett.5c05085
State	Published - Dec 17 2025

Funding

X.L. and S.W. acknowledge the support from Honda Research Institute USA, Inc. We are grateful to A. Yacoby and S. Chen for help and technical support with the microwave measurements. We are grateful to F. Ding for discussion on the growth mechanism. We are grateful to Y. Hu for drawing the growth illustration. We are grateful to Yehia Khalifa and Christopher Brooks for helping with XPS measurement. Work in the S.-Y.X. group was partly supported through the Center for the Advancement of Topological Semimetals (CATS), an Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC) funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science (fabrication and measurements), through the Ames National Laboratory under contract DE-AC0207CH11358. S.-Y.X. acknowledges the Corning Fund for Faculty Development. S.-Y.X. was supported by the NSF Career DMR-2143177. STEM characterization was conducted as part of a user project at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, which is a U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science User Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The DFT-based thermodynamic calculation was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences, Materials Sciences and Engineering Division. This research used resources of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725. AFM measurements were performed at the Stanford Nano Shared Facilities (SNSF) RRID:SCR_023230, supported by the National Science Foundation under award ECCS-2026822. T.-R.C. was supported by National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) in Taiwan (Program No. NSTC 114-2628-M-006-005-MY3 and NSTC113-2124-M-006-009-MY3), National Cheng Kung University (NCKU), Taiwan, and National Center for Theoretical Sciences, Taiwan. This research was supported, in part, by the Higher Education Sprout Project, Ministry of Education to the Headquarters of University Advancement at NCKU. T.-R.C. thanks the National Center for High Performance Computing (NCHC) of National Applied Research Laboratories (NARLabs) in Taiwan for providing computational and storage resources.

Keywords

Berry curvature dipole
T-phase WTe
nonlinear Hall effect
vapor−liquid−solid mechanism

Access to Document

10.1021/acs.nanolett.5c05085

Cite this

Wu, S., Liu, Y. F., Kwon, S. Y., Lim, T. Y., Yeom, S., Gao, A., Li, H., Unocic, R. R., Varghese, A. M., Lopez-Torres, E., Xiao, K., Chang, T. R., Yoon, M., Xu, S. Y., & Li, X. (2025). Water-Assisted Concerted Layer Growth of T_d-Phase WTe₂for Nonlinear Hall Effect and Microwave Rectification. Nano Letters, 25(50), 17475-17484. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.nanolett.5c05085

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abstract = "The Td phase of tungsten ditelluride (WTe2), a noncentrosymmetric transition metal dichalcogenide, hosts rich correlated phenomena, topological states, and nonlinear transport responses. However, the scalable synthesis of high-quality few-layer WTe2 with precise layer control remains challenging. Here, we report a water-assisted chemical vapor deposition approach that deterministically grows monolayer to trilayer Td-WTe2 with controlled flake size and density. Moisture-mediated precursor liquefaction through salt-assisted intermediates enables vapor–liquid–solid growth and tunable layer numbers through a concerted layer growth mode. Transport studies reveal that trilayer WTe2 exhibits a nonlinear Hall effect susceptibility of 1.1 μm·V–1 at 10 K and 0.5 μm·V–1 at 50 K, nearly an order of magnitude higher than that in bilayers, consistent with the calculated Berry curvature dipole enhancement. Layer-dependent microwave rectification further highlights the influence of topological band structure and interlayer coupling. These results establish layer-engineered Td-WTe2 as a promising platform for nonlinear quantum transport and high-frequency optoelectronic applications.",

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