Mapping multi-valley Lifshitz transitions induced by field-effect doping in strained MoS2 nanolayers

Abstract

Gate-induced superconductivity at the surface of nanolayers of semiconducting transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) has attracted a lot of attention in recent years, thanks to the sizeable transition temperature, robustness against in-plane magnetic fields beyond the Pauli limit, and hints to a non-conventional nature of the pairing. A key information necessary to unveil its microscopic origin is the geometry of the Fermi surface hosting the Cooper pairs as a function of field-effect doping, which is dictated by the filling of the inequivalent valleys at the K/K and Q/Q points of the Brillouin zone. Here, we achieve this by combining density functional theory calculations of the bandstructure with transport measurements on ion-gated 2H-MoS2 nanolayers. We show that, when the number of layers and the amount of strain are set to their experimental values, the Fermi level crosses the bottom of the high-energy valleys at Q/Q at doping levels where characteristic kinks in the transconductance are experimentally detected. We also develop a simple 2D model which is able to quantitatively describe the broadening of the kinks observed upon increasing temperature. We demonstrate that this combined approach can be employed to map the dependence of the Fermi surface of TMD nanolayers on field-effect doping, detect Lifshitz transitions, and provide a method to determine the amount of strain and spin–orbit splitting between sub-bands from electric transport measurements in real devices.