Plasma induced dynamic coupling of microscopic factors to collaboratively promote EM losses coupling of transition metal dichalcogenide absorbers

Plasma as the fourth state of matter has attracted great attention for material surface modification, which could induce changes in material microscopic factors, such as defects, phase transitions, crystallinity, and so on. However, the interactions among those microscopic factors and regulation mechanism of macroscopic properties have rarely been investigated. Two-dimensional (2D) transition metal dichalcogenide with tunable structure and phase is one of the most promising electromagnetic wave (EMW) absorbers, which provides a favorable platform for systematically studying the dynamic coupling of its microscopic factors. Herein, we constructed a NaBH4 solution-assisted Ar plasma method to modify the 2H–MoS2 and 1T-WS2 for exploring the regulation mechanism of microscopic factors. For MoS2 and WS2, NaBH4 solution-assisted Ar plasma treatment behaves with different effects on dielectric responses, realizing dynamic coupling of material microscopic factors to collaboratively promote EM losses coupling. Consequently, the MS-D3-0.5 (MoS2, 3 kV voltage, 0.5 mol L−1 NaBH4 solution) displays an optimum effective absorption bandwidth of 8.01 GHz, which is 319.4 % more than that of MS-raw sample. This study not only reveals the novel mechanism of plasma induced dynamic coupling of microscopic factors for EMW dissipation, but also presents a new method of plasma-dominated surface modification to optimize the EMW absorption performance.