Salt-assisted clean transfer of continuous monolayer MoS2 film for hydrogen evolution reaction

The transfer of two-dimensional (2D) materials from one substrate to another is challenging but of great importance for technological applications. Here, we propose a facile etching and residue-free method for transferring a large-area monolayer MoS2 film continuously grown on a SiO2/Si by chemical vapor deposition. Prior to synthesis, the substrate is dropped with water- soluble perylene-3, 4, 9, 10-tetracarboxylic acid tetrapotassium salt (PTAS). The as-grown MoS2 on the substrate is simply dipped in water to quickly dissolve PTAS to yield the MoS2 film floating on the water surface, which is subsequently transferred to the desired substrate. The morphological, optical and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopic results show that our method is useful for fast and clean transfer of the MoS2 film. Specially, we demonstrate that monolayer MoS2 film transferred onto a conducting substrate leads to excellent performance for hydrogen evolution reaction with low overpotential (0.29 V vs the reversible hydrogen electrode) and Tafel slope (85.5 mV/decade).