The cleaning of two-dimensional (2D) materials is an essential step in the fabrication of future devices, leveraging their unique physical, optical, and chemical properties. Part of these emerging 2D materials are transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs). So far there is limited understanding of the cleaning of “monolayer” TMD materials. In this study, we report on the use of downstream H₂ plasma to clean the surface of monolayer WS₂ grown by MOCVD. We demonstrate that high-temperature processing is essential, allowing to maximize the removal rate of polymers and to mitigate damage caused to the WS₂ in the form of sulfur vacancies. We show that low temperature in situ carbonyl sulfide (OCS) soak is an efficient way to resulfurize the material, besides high-temperature H₂S annealing. The cleaning processes and mechanisms elucidated in this work are tested on back-gated field-effect transistors, confirming that transport properties of WS₂ devices can be maintained by the combination of H₂ plasma cleaning and OCS restoration. The low-damage plasma cleaning based on H₂ and OCS is very reproducible, fast (completed in a few minutes) and uses a 300 mm industrial plasma etch system qualified for standard semiconductor pilot production. This process is, therefore, expected to enable the industrial scale-up of 2D-based devices, co-integrated with silicon technology.

Cycling stability and specific capacitance are the most critical features of energy sources. Nitrogen incorporation in crystalline carbon lattice allows to increase the capacitance without increasing the mass of electrodes. Despite the fact that many studies demonstrate the increase in the capacitance of energy sources after nitrogen incorporation, the mechanism capacitance increase is still unclear. Herein, we demonstrate the simple approach of plasma treatment of carbon structures, which leads to incorporation of 3 at.% nitrogen into Carbon NanoWalls. These structures have huge specific surface area and can be used for supercapacitor fabrication. After plasma treatment, the specific capacitance of Carbon NanoWalls increased and reached 600 F g⁻¹. Moreover, we made a novel DFT simulation which explains the mechanism of nitrogen incorporation into the carbon lattice. This work paves the way to develop flexible thin film supercapacitors based on carbon nanowalls.

Radiation conditions are described for various space regions, radiation-induced effects in spacecraft materials and equipment components are considered and information on theoretical, computational, and experimental methods for studying radiation effects are presented. The peculiarities of radiation effects on nanostructures and some problems related to modeling and radiation testing of such structures are considered.