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Two-dimensional (2D) materials assembled into van der Waals (vdW) heterostructures contain unlimited combinations of mechanical, optical, and electrical properties that can be harnessed for potential device applications. Critically, these structures require control over interfacial adhesion for enabling their construction and have enough integrity to survive industrial fabrication processes upon their integration. Here, we promptly determine the adhesion quality of various exfoliated 2D materials on conventional SiO 2 /Si substrates using ultrasonic delamination threshold testing. This test allows us to quickly infer relative substrate adhesion based on the percent area of 2D flakes that survive a fixed time in an ultrasonic bath, allowing for control over process parameters that yield high or poor adhesion. We leverage this control of adhesion to optimize the vdW heterostructure assembly process, where we show that samples with high or low substrate adhesion relative to each other can be used selectively to construct high-throughput vdW stacks. Instead of tuning the adhesion of polymer stamps to 2D materials with constant 2D-substrate adhesion, we tune the 2D-substrate adhesion with constant stamp adhesion to 2D materials. The polymer stamps may be reused without any polymer melting steps, thus avoiding high temperatures (<120 °C) and allowing for high-throughput production. We show that this procedure can be used to create high-quality 2D twisted bilayer graphene on SiO 2 /Si, characterized with atomic force microscopy and Raman spectroscopic mapping, as well as low-angle twisted bilayer WSe 2 on h-BN/SiO 2 /Si, where we show direct real-space visualization of moiré reconstruction with tilt-angle dependent scanning electron microscopy.
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Direct measurements of interfacial adhesion in 2D materials and van der Waals heterostructures in ambient air
Abstract Interfacial adhesion energy is a fundamental property of two-dimensional (2D) layered materials and van der Waals heterostructures due to their intrinsic ultrahigh surface to volume ratio, making adhesion forces very strong in many processes related to fabrication, integration and performance of devices incorporating 2D crystals. However, direct quantitative characterization of adhesion behavior of fresh and aged homo/heterointerfaces at nanoscale has remained elusive. Here, we use an atomic force microscopy technique to report precise adhesion measurements in ambient air through well-defined interactions of tip-attached 2D crystal nanomesas with 2D crystal and SiO x substrates. We quantify how different levels of short-range dispersive and long-range electrostatic interactions respond to airborne contaminants and humidity upon thermal annealing. We show that a simple but very effective precooling treatment can protect 2D crystal substrates against the airborne contaminants and thus boost the adhesion level at the interface of similar and dissimilar van der Waals heterostructures. Our combined experimental and computational analysis also reveals a distinctive interfacial behavior in transition metal dichalcogenides and graphite/SiO x heterostructures beyond the widely accepted van der Waals interaction.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1636132
- PAR ID:
- 10223910
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Nature Communications
- Volume:
- 11
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2041-1723
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-19411-7
