Controllable Growth and Transfer of Monolayer MoS₂ on Au Foils and Its Potential Application in Hydrogen Evolution Reaction

Controllable synthesis of monolayer MoS2 is essential for fulfilling the application potentials of MoS2 in optoelectronics and valleytronics, etc. Herein, we report the scalable growth of high quality, domain size tunable (edge length from ∼ 200 nm to 50 μm), strictly monolayer MoS2 flakes or even complete films on commercially available Au foils, via low pressure chemical vapor deposition method. The as-grown MoS2 samples can be transferred onto arbitrary substrates like SiO2/Si and quartz with a perfect preservation of the crystal quality, thus probably facilitating its versatile applications. Of particular interest, the nanosized triangular MoS2 flakes on Au foils are proven to be excellent electrocatalysts for hydrogen evolution reaction, featured by a rather low Tafel slope (61 mV/decade) and a relative high exchange current density (38.1 μA/cm(2)). The excellent electron coupling between MoS2 and Au foils is considered to account for the extraordinary hydrogen evolution reaction activity. Our work reports the synthesis of monolayer MoS2 when introducing metal foils as substrates, and presents sound proof that monolayer MoS2 assembled on a well selected electrode can manifest a hydrogen evolution reaction property comparable with that of nanoparticles or few-layer MoS2 electrocatalysts.