First principle investigation of the influence of sulfur vacancies on thermoelectric properties of single layered MoS2.

Thermoelectric properties of single layered transition metal dichalchogenide MoS2 are investigated on the basis of ab initio calculations combined with Landauer formalism. The focus is made on sulfur vacancy defects that are experimentally observed to be largely present in materials especially in exfoliated two dimensional MoS2 compounds. The impact of these defects on phonon and electron transport properties is investigated here using a realistic description of their natural disordering. It is observed that phonons tend to localize around defects which induce a drastic reduction in thermal conductivity. For p type doping the figure of merit is almost insensitive to the defects while for n type doping the figure of merit rapidly tends to be zero for the increasing length of the system. These features are linked with a larger scattering of the electrons in the conduction band than that of holes in the valence band.

Drastic effects of vacancies on phonon lifetime and thermal conductivity in graphene.

Understanding thermal transport in 2D materials and especially in graphene is a key challenge for the design of heat management and energy conversion devices. The high sensitivity of measured transport properties to structural defects, ripples and vacancies is of crucial importance in these materials. Using a first principle based approach combined with an exact treatment of the disorder, we address the impact of vacancies on phonon lifetimes and thermal transport in graphene. We find that perturbation theory fails completely and overestimates phonon lifetimes by almost two orders of magnitude. Whilst, in defected graphene, longitudinal acoustic and transverse acoustic modes remain well defined, the out of plane acoustic (ZA) modes become marginal. In the long wavelength limit, the ZA dispersion changes from quadratic to linear and the scattering rate is found proportional to the phonon energy, in contrast to the quadratic scaling often assumed. The impact on thermal transport, calculated beyond the relaxation time approximation and including first principle phonon-phonon scattering rates as reported recently for pristine graphene, reveals spectacular effects even for extremely low vacancy concentrations.