No Arabic abstract
In this paper, a method is presented to create and characterize mechanically robust, free standing, ultrathin, oxide films with controlled, nanometer-scale thickness using Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD) on graphene. Aluminum oxide films were deposited onto suspended graphene membranes using ALD. Subsequent etching of the graphene left pure aluminum oxide films only a few atoms in thickness. A pressurized blister test was used to determine that these ultrathin films have a Youngs modulus of 154 pm 13 GPa. This Youngs modulus is comparable to much thicker alumina ALD films. This behavior indicates that these ultrathin two-dimensional films have excellent mechanical integrity. The films are also impermeable to standard gases suggesting they are pinhole-free. These continuous ultrathin films are expected to enable new applications in fields such as thin film coatings, membranes and flexible electronics.
The outstanding electrical and mechanical properties of graphene make it very attractive for several applications, Nanoelectronics above all. However a reproducible and non destructive way to produce high quality, large-scale area, single layer graphene sheets is still lacking. Chemical Vapour Deposition of graphene on Cu catalytic thin films represents a promising method to reach this goal, because of the low temperatures (T < 900 Celsius degrees) involved during the process and of the theoretically expected monolayer self-limiting growth. On the contrary such self-limiting growth is not commonly observed in experiments, thus making the development of techniques allowing for a better control of graphene growth highly desirable. Here we report about the local ablation effect, arising in Raman analysis, due to the heat transfer induced by the laser incident beam onto the graphene sample.
The integration of two-dimensional (2D) materials with functional non-2D materials such as metal oxides is of key importance for many applications, but underlying mechanisms for such non-2D/2D interfacing remain largely elusive at the atomic scale. To address this, we here investigate the nucleation stage in atomic layer deposition (ALD) of the important metal oxide HfO2 on chemical vapor deposited graphene using atomically resolved and element specific scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM). To avoid any deleterious influence of polymer residues from pre-ALD graphene transfers we employ a substrate-assisted ALD process directly on the as grown graphene still remaining on its Cu growth catalyst support. Thereby we resolve at the atomic scale key factors governing the integration of non-2D metal oxides with 2D materials by ALD: Particular to our substrate-assisted ALD process we find a graphene-layer-dependent catalytic participation of the supporting Cu catalyst in the ALD process. We further confirm at high resolution the role of surface irregularities such as steps between graphene layers on oxide nucleation. Employing the energy transfer from the scanning electron beam to in situ crystallize the initially amorphous ALD HfO2 on graphene, we observe HfO2 crystallization to non-equilibrium HfO2 polymorphs (cubic/tetragonal). Finally our data indicates a critical role of the graphenes atmospheric adventitious carbon contamination on the ALD process whereby this contamination acts as an unintentional seeding layer for metal oxide ALD nucleation on graphene under our conditions. As atmospheric adventitious carbon contamination is hard to avoid in any scalable 2D materials processing, this is a critical factor in ALD recipe development for 2D materials coating. Combined our work highlights several key mechanisms underlying scalable ALD oxide growth on 2D materials.
We develop an InAs nanowire gate-all-around field-effect transistor using a transparent conductive zinc oxide (ZnO) gate electrode, which is in-situ atomic layer deposited after growth of gate insulator of Al2O3. We perform magneto-transport measurements and find a crossover from weak localization to weak antilocalization effect with increasing gate voltage, which demonstrates that the Rashba spin-orbit coupling is tuned by the gate electrode. The efficiency of the gate tuning of the spin-orbit interaction is higher than those obtained for two-dimensional electron gas, and as high as that for a gate-all-around nanowire metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor that was previously reported. The spin-orbit interaction is discussed in line with not only conventionally used one-dimensional model but also recently proposed model that considers effects of microscopic band structures of materials.
Despite many efforts the origin of a ferromagnetic (FM) response in ZnMnO and ZnCoO is still not clear. Magnetic investigations of our samples, not discussed here, show that the room temperature FM response is observed only in alloys with a non-uniform Mn or Co distribution. Thus, the control of their distribution is crucial for explanation of contradicted magnetic properties of ZnCoO and ZnMnO reported till now. In the present review we discuss advantages of the Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD) growth method, which enables us to control uniformity of ZnMnO and ZnCoO alloys. Properties of ZnO, ZnMnO and ZnCoO films grown by the ALD are discussed.
Heterostructures play significant roles in modern semiconductor devices and micro/nanosystems in a plethora of applications in electronics, optoelectronics, and transducers. While state-of-the-art heterostructures often involve stacks of crystalline epi-layers each down to a few nanometers thick, the intriguing limit would be heterto-atomic-layer structures. Here we report the first experimental demonstration of freestanding van der Waals heterostructures and their functional nanomechanical devices. By stacking single-layer (1L) MoS2 on top of suspended single-, bi-, tri- and four-layer (1L to 4L) graphene sheets, we realize array of MoS2-graphene heterostructures with varying thickness and size. These heterostructures all exhibit robust nanomechanical resonances in the very high frequency (VHF) band (up to ~100 MHz). We observe that fundamental-mode resonance frequencies of the heterostructure devices fall between the values of graphene and MoS2 devices. Quality (Q) factors of heterostructure resonators are lower than those of graphene but comparable to those of MoS2 devices, suggesting interface damping related to interlayer interactions in the van der Waals heterostructures. This study validates suspended atomic layer heterostructures as an effective device platform and opens opportunities for exploiting mechanically coupled effects and interlayer interactions in such devices.