Hydrogen-Bonding Integrated Low-Dimensional Flexible Electronics beyond the Limitations of Van Der Waals Contacts.

Van der Waals (vdW) integration enables clean contacts for low-dimensional electronic devices. The limitation remains, however, that an additional tunneling contact resistance occurs, owing to the inherent vdW gap between the metal and the semiconductor. Here we demonstrate from theoretical calculations that stronger non-covalent hydrogen-bonding interactions facilitate electron tunneling and significantly reduce the contact resistance, thus promising to break the limitations of the vdW contact. π-Plane hydrogen-bonding contacts in surface-engineered MXene/carbon nanotube metal/semiconductor heterojunctions are realized, and an anomalous temperature-dependent tunneling resistance is observed. Low-dimensional flexible thin-film transistors integrated by hydrogen-bonding contacts exhibit both excellent flexibility and carrier mobility orders of magnitude higher than their counterparts with vdW contacts. Our strategy demonstrates a scalable solution for realizing high-performance and low-power flexible electronics beyond vdW contacts. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.