A team has developed thin films of molybdenum disulfide in the 2H phase (2H-MoS₂) deposited by sputtering over large areas, capable of converting both spin and orbital charge into electrical current. The technique, standard in the semiconductor industry, scales up production of these two-dimensional materials beyond the small flakes obtained by exfoliation or chemical vapour growth.

Spin-to-charge conversion is the basis of spintronics: inject spin-polarised carriers into a material and recover a detectable electrical current. Most conversion studies in transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) so far have used micrometre-sized, high-quality crystalline samples that are hard to integrate into real devices. The 2H phase of MoS₂, a semiconductor with appreciable spin–orbit coupling, is a natural candidate, but large-area deposition has so far yielded inferior properties.

The work shows that sputtered films retain the 2H phase and exhibit spin and orbital charge conversion efficiencies comparable to those of single crystals. Orbital charge conversion is particularly relevant: the orbital moment of electrons in the valence-band valleys of MoS₂ can be exploited as an additional current source, bypassing the spin limitations in materials with moderate spin–orbit coupling.

The industrial sputtering route opens the door to integrating spin and orbital conversion layers directly onto silicon wafers, without transfer processes that degrade interfaces. Whether reproducibility and interface quality reach the level required for spintronic memory or logic devices, and whether other MoS₂ phases or other TMDs respond equally well to the same deposition method, remains to be seen.