Review Reports

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This manuscript presents a description of mechanical and electrical calculations at the atomic scale of MoS2 stressed between two gold walls.

At least, a picture with the starting nanoribbon is required to see the edges, and several references need to be added to validate the choices.
The calculations are at 0K. The sliding is thus not permitted (metastable and stable systems show no difference at 0K) and due to the symmetry of the system, the deformation is as expected (fully symmetric).
What happens at 300K? What happens if the left gold wall is shifted along the vertical?
Several typos: "reefer" line 183, "uA" in figure 4
If fig3 correct the potential energy seems the same on the bottom left and right.
Fig 4 gives different results but the question is what are the layers.
Is the h-BN-MoS2 structure relaxed and then stressed by the 2 walls?
For me, it is so arbitrary and due to the poor description of the system, it's not possible to understand what happens at the interfaces Au/structure.
The geometrical edges choice and the stability study are definitively missing.
The paper is well written but contains some serious deficiencies.

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report

Abstract not include any future study suggestion for the current results

Methodology not include the research period or date.

 

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Reviewer 3 Report

The Authors presented piezoresistive memory bits based on two-dimensional nanoscale electromechanical systems. They show in the manuscript that it is possible to obtain different electrical responses by carefully controlling microstructural asymmetries, and that information can be encoded and read in classical RAMs by measuring the current flowing through the device. The work is interesting, nevertheless I have a few minor comments:

- in keywords, please explain the abbreviations, DFT, BN, and MoS2 - 2 should be with the index

- line 74 - space "eV [35 ..." and also lines 134, 137, and others

- Fig 2 - "DOS" should be (no DoS) and maybe it is worth signing the states, because I don't know what it is about, i.e. s, p, d.

- the conclusions need to be refined and supplemented with numerical results.

- I recommend papers to Authors that may be useful for introduction to this article: 1) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2525217 and 2) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cryogenics.2020.103117

Summary: After minor corrections, I recommend the manuscript for publication.

Author Response

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Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors have improved their manuscript but one misunderstanding remains.
Sliding is obviously between the gold wall and the MoS2 layer and is linked to the gold wall's shift. Is such large bending of the layers possible without sliding?
Just discuss this point and maybe perform a complementary calculation to avoid speculation
Asked references are about the edges. Finishing by S is classical (see for example Fenget al ACS nano, 9(7), 7450-7455, 2015 or Li et al Science, 349(6247), 524-528, 2015) while finishing by Mo is not. It can be justified by the will to explore all possibilities but a comment is expected.

Author Response

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