Nguyen gives a talk at MRS

Transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) monolayers, such as WSe₂, WS₂, MoSe₂, and MoS₂, possess distinct physical properties due to the strong coupling between spin and valley degrees of freedom.(1, 2) As monolayer TMDs have a direct bandgap lying in visible range, they have been studied extensively by optical methods.(2, 3) Heterostructures of monolayer TMDs with other functional materials are currently attracting significant attention due to the opportunities to access and utilize their spin-valley degrees of freedom through electrical means.(4) For instance, TMD-ferromagnet heterostructures have been employed recently to study spin current generation in TMDs. (4, 5) The quality of atomically thin TMDs, however, is strongly affected by deposition techniques of metallic layers and have not been fully investigated.(6) In this work, we report the fabrication of Pt/Co multilayer using pulsed laser deposition (PLD) on monolayer WSe₂ grown bymetalorganic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) on single crystalline (0001)-oriented Al₂O₃ substrates. PLD is a plasma based deposition technique capable of tuning of kinetic and thermodynamic conditions over an expanse range to elucidate and control fundamental structure-property relationships across a wide variety of material classes. (7)Using Raman Spectroscopy, we monitor deposition induced damage on monolayer WSe₂. The pressure of Argon process gas is found to suppress deposition induced defects in WSe_2, which indicates that the primary source of defect generation comes from ion bombardment. Further, we report on magnetometry and spin torque measurements of our WSe₂-ferromagnet heterostructures and demonstrate the generation of spin current from TMD layer.  We anticipate that our results will advance the electrical investigation of spin-valley and spin generation phenomena in 2D hybrid heterostructures for spintronics.