Zoltán Tajkov

Ultrastrong Au–Te bonding drives disorder in monolayer ZrTe5 on gold

Abstract Monolayer ZrTe $$_5$$ is predicted to host a large-gap quantum spin Hall phase, motivating efforts to isolate single layers of the material. Gold-assisted exfoliation produces clean monolayers of many chalcogen-terminated van der Waals crystals, but the strong Te–Au bond...