The article published by Dr. Wang and Dr. Chen in Nature Communications in January 2026 has the title:

“Metallic tellurium for p-type contacts of two-dimensional MoTe2 field-effect transistors. Congratulations to Hao and Chen Shen”

The link to the publication is here:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-67948-2

The study was a cooperation between the TMM group and the team of Prof. Zhenxing Wang and Associate Prof. Feng Wang at the National Center for Nanoscience and Technology, Beijing, P.R. China.

From a theoretical perspective, forming efficient contacts to atomically thin semiconductors is a major challenge, as conventional metal interfaces often suffer from strong Fermi-level pinning and interface states that block charge injection. The analysis shows that the tellurium contact forms a weakly interacting, atomically sharp interface with MoTe₂, which suppresses detrimental interface effects and enables favorable band alignment for hole injection. This explains the experimentally observed low contact resistance and high device performance.

More broadly, the results point to an important design principle for future nanoelectronics: high-performance contacts to 2D semiconductors can be achieved by engineering metallic phases with controlled, weak interfacial coupling, rather than relying on strong chemical bonding. This provides a new conceptual direction for contact engineering in next-generation atomically thin devices.

The authors H. Wang and H. Zhang acknowledge support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft under the FLAIR Project (ID 463184206 – SFB 1548).