Resonant quenching of Raman scattering due to out-of-plane A1g/A′1 modes in few-layer MoTe2

Temperature-dependent (5 K–300 K) Raman scattering study of A1g/A′1 phonon modes in mono-layer (1L), bilayer (2L), trilayer (3L), and tetralayer (4L) MoTe2 is reported. The temperature evolution of the modes’ intensity critically depends on the flake thickness. In particular with λ=632.8-nm light excitation, a strongly non-monotonic dependence of the A1g mode intensity is observed in 2L MoTe2. The intensity decreases with decreasing temperature down to 220 K, and the A1g mode almost completely vanishes from the Stokes scattering spectrum in the temperature range between 160 K and 220 K. The peak recovers at lower temperatures, and at T=5 K, it becomes three times more intense that at room temperature. Similar non-monotonic intensity evolution is observed for the out-of-plane mode in 3L MoTe2 in which tellurium atoms in all three layers vibrate in-phase. The intensity of the other out-of-plane Raman-active mode (with vibrations of tellurium atoms in the central layer shifted by 180° with respect to the vibrations in outer layers) only weakly depends on temperature. The observed quenching of the Raman scattering in 2L and 3L MoTe2 is attributed to a destructive interference between the resonant and non-resonant contributions to the Raman scattering amplitude. The observed “antiresonance” is related to the electronic excitation at the M point of the Brillouin zone in few-layer MoTe2.