Title: Chemical exfoliation of MoS2 leads to semiconducting 1T' phase and not the metallic 1T phase,
Abstract: A trigonal phase existing only as small patches on chemically exfoliated few
layer, thermodynamically stable 1H phase of MoS2 is believed to influence
critically properties of MoS2 based devices. This phase has been most often
attributed to the metallic 1T phase. We investigate the electronic structure of
chemically exfoliated MoS2 few layered systems using spatially resolved (lesser
than 120 nm resolution) photoemission spectroscopy and Raman spectroscopy in
conjunction with state-of-the-art electronic structure calculations. On the
basis of these results, we establish that the ground state of this phase is a
small gap (~90 meV) semiconductor in contrast to most claims in the literature;
we also identify the specific trigonal (1T') structure it has among many
suggested ones.