Atomically thin two dimensional hexagonal boron nitride (2D h-BN) is one of the key materials in the development of new van der Waals heterostructures due to its outstanding properties including an atomically smooth surface, high thermal conductivity, high mechanical strength, chemical inertness and high electrical resistance. The development of 2D h-BN growth is still in the early stages and largely depends on rapid and accurate characterization of the grown monolayer or few layers h-BN films.

In this work, the IR-active out-of-plane vibrational mode of 2D h‑BN films grown in vertical reactor by atmospheric-pressure CVD on metal substrates (mainly Cu but also Ni) is exploited to identify 2D h‑BN directly on substrates and studied both computationally and experimentally.

Fourier transform grazing-incidence infrared reflection absorption spectroscopy (FT-IRRAS) data have been used to characterize monolayer and few-layer h-BN films directly on metal substrates. Two sub-bands of the A_2u(LO) vibrational mode were, for the first time, found for thin 2D h-BN films in contact with Cu and Ni [1]. To unveil the nature of the discovered sub-bands, ab-initio calculations were performed and verified using 2D h-BN films grown on various Cu substrates with varying coverage and with individual crystallites of different shapes and size up to 4 mm. It was shown that the lower-energy A_2u(LO)1 sub-band around 819 cm^-1 is related to 2D h-BN coupled with Cu substrate, while the higher energy A_2u(LO)2 sub-band around 824 cm^-1 is related to decoupled (essentially free standing) 2D h-BN. These findings demonstrate not only a new and facile method for immediate 2D h-BN identification and characterization, but also a method that provides a simple means to characterize the degree of coupling between 2D h-BN and the substrate. This approach also provides an opportunity to determine which growth conditions lead to the absorption of foreign species on the substrate prior to the h-BN deposition and which conditions can prevent the formation of the interfacial layer between h-BN and the substrate. Such interfacial layers, like oxidized Cu, were shown to result in easily-recognizable shifts in the A_2u(LO) peak. The degree to which the interaction of the h BN layer with the substrate is uniform and homogenous can also be assessed easily by examining the width and fine structure of the A_2u(LO) band. The developed approach can also be used to study growth and formation of h-BN/graphene and other 2D heterostructures.

References

1. B. N. Feigelson, V. M. Bermudez, J. K. Hite, Z. R. Robinson, V. D. Wheeler, K. Sridhara, and S. C. Hernandez, Nanoscale 7, 3694 (2015)

The growth of two dimensional (2D) materials such as graphene, hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) and molybdenum disulphide (MoS₂) have been demonstrated by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) on polycrystalline catalytic copper substrates. These Cu foil substrates (25 µm thick) are produced by metallurgical rolling leading to the formation of irregular ridges on the foil surface along with a film of native oxide on the surface. These processing artifacts are a limiting factor for controlled and reproducible large area (several cm²) growth of 2D materials. Greater control of growth can be achieved by controlling the density of nucleation sites and improving the catalytic activity of Cu by removing the Cu native oxide on the surface. Previous attempts to pre-treat the Cu substrate by using wet chemistry or thermal annealing to control growth has been weakly addressed.

In this work, electropolishing combined with prior thermal annealing at 1030°C for 5 hrs under H₂ is used to control the degree of roughness of cold rolled polycrystalline Cu foils, and subsequently, to explore the influence of electropolishing on the growth of 2D materials: graphene, h-BN and MoS₂. Electropolishing dissolves a thin surface layer of Cu, which contains surface defects and contaminants. This helps in decreasing the density of spontaneous nucleation sites by producing a morphologically uniform and contaminant-free surface. Secondary effects, etch pits which are ascribed to O₂ bubbling at random nucleation sites on Cu surface, are mitigated by using additives, such as acetic acid and ethylene glycol, in the H₃PO₄ electrolyte. Thermal annealing and electropolishing results in this work reveal that a roughness of ~1.2 nm (R_q) can be achieved as measured by Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) along with a greatly planarized Cu foil. AFM will also be used to establish the Cu substrate morphology and its relationship to the growth of 2D materials. Fourier Transform Infrared, and Raman spectroscopy will be used to confirm the existence of the 2D material. Preliminary growth studies of h-BN on these high quality Cu substrates demonstrate improved growth, as assessed by the metrics of size and count of h-BN crystals from Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) micrographs [1]. This work will demonstrate that thermal annealing followed by electropolishing leads to optimization of Cu foil surface resulting in the larger crystal size and a reduction in nucleation sites that induce 2D material crystal growth [1].

[1] K. Sridhara. “Growth of hexagonal boron nitride on electrochemically prepared polycrystalline Cu substrates.” M.S. Thesis, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, 2014.

Two dimensional (2D), layered transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), e.g., MoS₂, are of increasing interest for next-generation nanoelectronic and optoelectronic devices. These materials have thickness dependent optical and electrical properties that make them suitable for a variety of applications including integrated circuits. For many applications, high volume manufacturing (HVM) of devices based on TMDs will require deposition techniques that are capable of reproducibly growing wafer-scale, 2D TMD films with monolayer control. To date, such a capability has not been widely demonstrated with typical TMD deposition processes.

This work aims to identify promising chemistries for HVM TMD chemical vapor deposition (CVD) processes. We focus on MoS₂ CVD using a variety of precursors (including organometallics, elemental sulfur, and organosulfur compounds) in a research grade single-wafer deposition system equipped with in situ optical diagnostics. The precursor flux is measured using optical mass flow meters installed on the delivery lines while deposition chemistry is characterized in the reactor volume above the deposition surface using in situ Fourier transform infrared (FR-IR) spectroscopy. As-deposited and annealed films are characterized with ex situ techniques, including Raman and photoluminescence spectroscopy, scanning and transmission electron microscopy, and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy.

Stoichiometric MoS₂ films have been prepared from (η⁵-ethylcyclopentadienyl)-dicarbonylnitrosyl molybdenum and elemental sulfur. As-grown films are smooth and continuous with major MoS₂ Raman modes present. Film thickness scales approximately with Mo precursor exposure time and few-layer films can be produced using pulsed injection mode. Furthermore, optical in situ diagnostics allow us to relate metal precursor flux to film crystallinity and facilitate the study of precursor decomposition in the thermal boundary layer.

Interfaces are ubiquitous in material science and technologies. For example, grain boundaries often dominate the mechanical and electrical properties in crystalline materials, while interfaces between dissimilar materials form the fundamental building blocks to diverse technologies, such as building electrical contacts in transistors and PN diodes in solar cells. Interfaces become even more important in 2D materials such as graphene and transition metal dichalcogenides, where the lack of dangling bonds enables material stability down to a single monolayer. In this entirely surface-dominated limit, the usual rules governing 3D interface devices, such as depletion regions, break down.

In this talk, we will discuss our work on engineering in- and out-of-plane 2D materials interfaces. We will first examine the structure of atomically-thin membranes and the impact of defects such as grain boundaries on the mechanical, optical, and electronic properties. We fabricate out-of-plane interfaces by stacking 2D materials to form heterostructures, which we utilize to tailor the bandgap in 2D materials and build new optoelectronic devices such as tunable photodiodes. Looking to the future, the rapidly expanding family of 2D materials with a diverse set of electronic properties provide a promising palette for discovering emergent phenomena and a motivation for developing overarching design principles for understanding and controlling interfaces in 2D.

Clean suspended graphene is used as supporting media in TEM, filtering membranes, and as electron transparent windows in ambient pressure electron spectroscopy and microscopy. CVD grown graphene is the most popular material for these applications due to its large-scale and high yield production. Multiple approaches such as sacrificial layer based methods [1] and direct transfer method on perforated carbon mesh by IPA droplet [2] have been implemented to transport graphene from copper or nickel foil onto a target substrate. However, the cleanness of the suspended graphene remains to be an issue, and controversial results on lateral size of atomically clean graphene domains have been reported [2-5]. We conduct the comparative analysis of the most widely-used CVD graphene transfer and cleaning protocols. In particular, using extreme surface sensitivity of low energy SEM, we compare the standard PMMA based approach with direct graphene transfer method. We also propose alternative graphene transfer protocol which is based on employment of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) as a sacrificial layer. The advantage of PAH method over others consists in facile sublimation of sacrificial layer upon heating PAH material within moderate temperature range of 100-150 ^oC. All three methods of graphene transfer were compared under the same conditions followed by similar graphene cleaning procedures by platinum catalysis [4] and activated carbon adsorption [5]. Both SEM and TEM study revealed the superiority of PAH method to achieve cleaner suspended CVD graphene. We envision that novel approach of graphene transfer can be employed under conditions when exposure of the sample to moisture is prohibited such as in battery research.

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[1] “Transfer of CVD-Grown Monolayer Graphene onto Arbitrary Substrates”, Ji Won Suk et al., ACS Nano, 2011, 5 (9), pp. 6916.

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[2] “A direct transfer of layer-area graphene”, William Regan et al., Appl. Phys. Lett., 2010, 96, 113102.

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[3] “Low-energy electron holographic imaging of gold nanorods supported by ultraclean graphene”, Jean-Nicolas Longchamp et al., Ultramicroscopy 145 (2014) 80.

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[4] “Ultraclean freestanding graphene by platinum-metal catalysis”, Jean-Nicolas Longchamp et al., J. Vac. Sci. Technol. B 31, 020605 (2013).

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[5] “Dry-cleaning of graphene”, Gerardo Algara-Siller et al., Applied Physics Letters 104, 153115 (2014).

Recent work on two-dimensional materials has focused on transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), owing to their semiconducting behavior. Characterizing as-grown TMDs is crucial in improving the understanding of the effects of growth conditions, and ultimately improving material quality. Low-energy electron microscopy (LEEM) is a powerful tool for this purpose, providing real-space images with ~10 nm spatial resolution as well as selected-area low-energy electron diffraction (µLEED) of local crystal orientation at length scales down to ~ 1 µm. Additionally, by varying the incident electron beam energy, low-energy electron reflectivity (LEER) spectra are extracted.

In this work, comparative LEEM results are presented from three TMD materials: MoS₂ prepared by exfoliation (onto Si), MoSe₂ grown by molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) (on epitaxial graphene), and WSe₂ grown by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) (also on epitaxial graphene). It is found that for TMDs generally, the LEER spectra do not exhibit the oscillatory behavior (in the 0 – 6 eV range) that is seen for both graphene and hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) for various numbers of monolayers (MLs). This lack of oscillatory behavior is interpreted as being due to the weak coupling of the interlayer states localized in between the MLs, which is itself a result of the relatively large out-of-plane lattice parameter. Nevertheless, additional “band structure” features in the LEER spectra permit clear identification of the TMD materials relative to the substrates. The exfoliated flakes are seen to extend over many 10’s of mm, the MBE-grown MoSe₂ forms a nearly continuous film, and the CVD-grown WSe₂ forms triangular islands several mm in extent. µLEED studies of the MBE-grown MoSe₂ and CVD-grown WSe₂ reveal preferential orientation with the underlying graphene substrates.

The reduced work functions of the TMD materials relative to the underlying substrate are clearly evident in the onset voltages for the LEER spectra (i.e. the onset shifts in accordance with the local work function of the surface). Most significantly, for the WSe₂ islands, a predominant “tail” is observed in this onset, extending about 5V below the usual onset location. This tail is tentatively interpreted as arising from charging of the islands, perhaps due to polar termination at the edges of the TMD islands. Comparison of the data with simulated LEER spectra will be presented, as a test of this model for edge charge of the islands.

Work supported by the Center for Low Energy Systems Technology (LEAST), one of six SRC STARnet Centers sponsored by MARCO and DARPA, and by NSF-EFRI-1433496.

Similar to how carbon networks can be sculpted into low-dimensional allotropes such as fullerenes, nanotubes, and graphene with fundamentally different properties, it is possible to create similar “allotropes” of Ge or Sn with unique optoelectronic properties as well. Here, we will describe our recent success in the creation of hydrogen and organic-terminated group 14 graphane analogues, from the topochemical deintercalation of precursor Zintl phases, such as CaGe₂. We will discuss how the optical, electronic, and thermal properties of these materials can be systematically controlled by substituting either the surface ligand or via alloying with other Group 14 elements. Additionally, we have also developed an epitopotaxial approach for integrating precise thicknesses of Germanane layers onto Ge wafers that combines the epitaxial deposition of CaGe₂ precursor phases with the topotactic interconversion into the 2D material. Finally, we will describe our recent efforts on the synthesis and crystal structures of Sn-containing graphane alloys in order to access novel topological phenomena predicted to occur in these graphanes.