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Evolutionary selection growth of two-dimensional materials on polycrystalline substrates

Abstract

There is a demand for the manufacture of two-dimensional (2D) materials with high-quality single crystals of large size. Usually, epitaxial growth is considered the method of choice1 in preparing single-crystalline thin films, but it requires single-crystal substrates for deposition. Here we present a different approach and report the synthesis of single-crystal-like monolayer graphene films on polycrystalline substrates. The technological realization of the proposed method resembles the Czochralski process and is based on the evolutionary selection2 approach, which is now realized in 2D geometry. The method relies on ‘self-selection’ of the fastest-growing domain orientation, which eventually overwhelms the slower-growing domains and yields a single-crystal continuous 2D film. Here we have used it to synthesize foot-long graphene films at rates up to 2.5 cm h−1 that possess the quality of a single crystal. We anticipate that the proposed approach could be readily adopted for the synthesis of other 2D materials and heterostructures.

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Fig. 1: Experimental set-up and the graphene morphology on stationary substrates.
Fig. 2: Visualization of the graphene crystal orientations using etched hexagons.
Fig. 3: Crystallographic orientation of etched holes and characterization of the grown graphene.
Fig. 4: Fastest front-line crystallographic orientation and Wulff construction in 2D.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Laboratory Directed Research and Development Program and the Technology Innovation Program of ORNL managed by UT-Battelle, LLC, for the US Department of Energy (I.V.V. and Y.S.) and by ARPA-e award number DE-AR0000651 (I.V.V. and S.N.S.). STEM/TEM was supported as part of the Fluid Interface Reactions, Structures and Transport (FIRST) Center, an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the DOE BES (R.R.U.). A portion of this research was conducted at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, ORNL, by the Scientific User Facilities Division, DOE. The authors thank H. Meyer for XPS data. Work at Rice was supported by the DOE BES (DE-SC0012547) and in part (graphene-ribbon electronics motivation) by the Office of Naval Research (N00014-15-1-2372).

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Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Contributions

S.N.S. and I.V.V. conceived the idea and designed and conducted graphene growth experiments. Y.S. contributed to sample preparation and analysis. F.L. contributed to designing the substrate pulling mechanism. B.I.Y., N.G. and K.V.B. provided theoretical support. P.R.P and P.D.R fabricated and characterized graphene FETs. R.R.U., A.P.B., N.V.L. and I.N.I. performed material characterizations. I.V.V., S.N.S. and B.I.Y. wrote the manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Ivan V. Vlassiouk, Boris I. Yakobson or Sergei N. Smirnov.

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Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Tables: S1–S2, Supplementary Figures: Scheme S1, Figures S1–S29, Supplementary References 1–12

Videos

Supplementary Video 1

Interface tracking simulation results for k A /k Z > 2/√3

Supplementary Video 2

Interface tracking simulation results for k A /k Z = 0.95

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Vlassiouk, I.V., Stehle, Y., Pudasaini, P.R. et al. Evolutionary selection growth of two-dimensional materials on polycrystalline substrates. Nature Mater 17, 318–322 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-018-0019-3

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