Twisted Nanostructures of 2H-MoS2 Slabs

In the last decades, HRTEM approach has been quite fruitful to study structural characteristics of layered transition metal sulfide (LTMS) catalytic materials since providing direct local information about the structural organization of this quite important class of catalysts at the nanoscale level. However, up to now, HRTEM observations of some common localized structural organization like honeycomb-like structures have remained unexplained. In the present study, a structural model corresponding to stacked 2H-MoS2 slabs twisted along their basal direction is proposed to explain honeycomb like-structures observed by HRTEM. This model is based on a comparison between experimental and simulated images of 2H-MoS2 catalysts promoted with cobalt. The resulting Density of States (DOS) of the twisted structure was then calculated.