Also called 2H-MoTe₂, 1T′-MoTe₂, Td-MoTe₂
Molybdenum ditelluride can be a semiconductor or a metal depending on how its atoms are arranged, and the energy difference between the two arrangements is small enough to switch with heat, strain or a laser – so metal contacts and semiconductor channels can be patterned into the same sheet. Twisted bilayers of the semiconducting form produced the first fractional quantum anomalous Hall effect, in 2023.
They are coordination polyhedra. Only complete ones are drawn.
Three layers of semiconducting 2H-MoTe2, stacked like molybdenite: each layer is turned by 180° against the one below, so molybdenum sits over tellurium, and every second layer repeats. c = 13.96 Å. Cell from Puotinen and Newnham, Acta Crystallographica 14, 691 (1961); COD 2310465.
Three layers of 1T′-MoTe2 (also called β), the form stable at room temperature, seen along the molybdenum chains. Its layer is octahedral but distorted: the molybdenum atoms pair up into zigzag chains. Each layer is turned by 180° against the one below and slides across the chains, so c leans away from the layers (β = 93.9°): 6.91 Å between layers. This stack has an inversion centre. Layer and cell from Brown, Acta Crystallographica 20, 268 (1966); COD 2310356.
Three layers of Td-MoTe2, the form 1T′ turns into below about 250 K, seen along the molybdenum chains. The layers slide so that every second layer sits straight above the first, and c stands upright: 13.86 Å at 100 K. The Td stack has no inversion centre, which makes MoTe2 a candidate type-II Weyl semimetal. Drawn with the 1T′ layer, leaving out the small shifts inside each layer at the transition. Stacking of Td-WTe2 (space group Pmn21, which Td-MoTe2 shares), fitted to the 1T′ layer; c at 100 K from Tamai and colleagues, Physical Review X 6, 031021 (2016).
Readiness runs lab → prototype → pilot → deployed.
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Near-degenerate polymorphs make total energies sensitive to functional, dispersion correction and spin–orbit coupling – check phase rankings with several methods before trusting them. In twisted 2H-MoTe2 the topmost moiré valence bands carry nonzero Chern numbers with layer-pseudospin skyrmion textures, and exact diagonalisation of projected continuum models reproduces the fractional states.
Distinguish phases by Raman: 2H shows A1g near 171 cm−1 and E12g near 234 cm−1; 1T′ shows modes near 127, 161 and 256 cm−1, and the 1T′–Td transition around 250 K appears in low-frequency shear modes. Work in a glovebox.
Attractive as a way to make contacts and channels from one material, with a band gap suited to silicon photonics, but air sensitivity and phase instability are serious obstacles to manufacturing.
The newest items tagged MoTe2, from the news feed updated 5 Oct 2026.
Most proposals for Z3 parafermions in fractional quantum Hall-superconductor structures used the spin-unpolarized ν= 2/3 Halperin (1,1,2) state. The fractional quantum anomalous Hall (FQAH) states of twisted MoTe2 and rhombohedral graphene are believed to be spin- and valley-polarized Jain states, with the same…
Recently, the displacement-field-driven hysteretic switching of superconductivity was reported in ferroelectric bilayer Td-MoTe2. Such direct coupling between ferroelectricity and superconductivity offers promising pathways for low-power, non-volatile memory devices, but the underlying coupling mechanism remains poorly…
Radioactive iodine species, particularly I2 and CH3I, pose significant environmental and technological hazards owing to their high volatility, chemical stability, and relatively weak interaction with traditional substrate and sorption materials. In this work, we proposed a series of transition-metal (TM) (Fe, Ni, Cu…
Atomic bilayers of transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) host quantum phases governed by the layer degree of freedom, including bilayer Wigner crystals, fractional Chern insulators, and exciton condensates. These phases are probed primarily through exciton spectroscopy, yet it remains poorly understood how excitons…
Evidence for chiral superconductivity has recently been observed in several van der Waals systems including rhombohedral multilayer graphene and twisted bilayer MoTe2. In the latter, superconductivity emerges at carrier densities near a fractional Chern insulator. This raises the question of what kinds of…
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