Measuring the Refractive Index of Highly Crystalline Monolayer MoS(2) with High Confidence

Monolayer molybdenum disulphide (MoS(2)) has attracted much attention, due to its attractive properties, such as two-dimensional properties, direct bandgap, valley-selective circular dichroism, and valley Hall effect. However, some of its fundamental physical parameters, e.g. refractive index, have not been studied in detail because of measurement difficulties. In this work, we have synthesized highly crystalline monolayer MoS(2) on SiO(2)/Si substrates via chemical vapor deposition (CVD) method and devised a method to measure their optical contrast spectra. Using these contrast spectra, we extracted the complex refractive index spectrum of monolayer MoS(2) in the wavelength range of 400 nm to 750 nm. We have analyzed the pronounced difference between the obtained complex refractive index spectrum and that of bulk MoS(2). The method presented here is effective for two-dimensional materials of small size. Furthermore, we have calculated the color contour plots of the contrast as a function of both SiO(2) thickness and incident light wavelength for monolayer MoS(2) using the obtained refractive index spectrum. These plots are useful for both fundamental study and device application.