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Abnormal anti-oxidation behavior of hexagonal boron nitride grown on copper

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Abstract

Atomic-layered hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) is expected to be the best two-dimensional (2D) anti-oxidation layer on metals for its incomparable impermeability, insulativity, and stability, as well as the progressive bottom-up growth techniques to ensure fast coating on metal surface in large area. However, its real anti-oxidation ability in practice is found to be unsatisfactory and nonuniform, and the main obstacle to achieving ideal anti-oxidation performance lies in unclear anti-oxidation behavior at special interface between 2D hBN and three-dimensional (3D) metals. Herein, system of monolayer hBN grown on copper (Cu) foils with various lattice orientations was grown to investigate the anti-oxidation behavior of different interlayer configurations. By using structural characterizations together with analysis of topography, we surprisingly found that stronger interlayer coupling led to worse anti-oxidation performance owing to fast diffusion of O2 through higher hBN corrugations generated at the commensurate hBN/Cu(111) configuration. In view of this, we developed the approach of cyclic reannealing that can effectively flatten corrugations and steps, and therefore improve the anti-oxidation performance to a great extent. This work provides a more in-depth understanding of anti-oxidation behavior of 2D materials grown on 3D metals, and a practical method to pave the way for its large-scale applications in future.

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Acknowledgements

L. W., J. J. Q., and S. Z. contributed equally to this work. This work was supported by the Guangdong Major Project of Basic and Applied Basic Research (2021B0301030002), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 52025023, 51991342, 52021006, 11888101, 12025203, and 12104493), the Key Research & Development Program of Guangdong Province (Nos. 2020B010189001, 2019B010931001, and 2018B030327001), the Strategic Priority Research Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Nos. XDB33000000 and XDB33030200), Beijing Natural Science Foundation (No. JQ19004), Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (No. BK20170426), the Initiative Program of State Key Laboratory of Tribology (No. SKLT2019B02), National Key R&D Program of China (No. 2018YFA0703700), Program from Chinese Academy of Sciences (No. E0K5231B11), and the Pearl River Talent Recruitment Program of Guangdong Province (No. 2019ZT08C321). The authors are grateful for the support from the Electron Microscopy Laboratory in Peking University for the use of electron microscope, and the Vacuum Interconnected Nanotech Workstation (NANO-X) of Suzhou Institute of Nano-Tech and Nano-Bionics, the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

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  1. Li Wang, Jiajie Qi, and Shuai Zhang contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory for Mesoscopic Physics, Frontiers Science Center for Nano-optoelectronics, School of Physics, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China

    Li Wang, Jiajie Qi, Jinhuan Wang, Zhihong Zhang, Zhibin Zhang, Zehui Li, Hao Hong, Can Liu & Kaihui Liu

  2. Beijing National Laboratory for Condensed Matter Physics, Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China

    Li Wang, Mingchao Ding, Wenlong Wang & Xuedong Bai

  3. Department of Engineering Mechanics, State Key Laboratory of Tribology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

    Shuai Zhang & Qunyang Li

  4. Vacuum Interconnected Nanotech Workstation, Suzhou Institute of Nano-Tech and Nano-Bionics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Suzhou, 215123, China

    Wei Wei & Yi Cui

  5. School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, 100081, China

    Jinhuan Wang

  6. International Centre for Quantum Materials, Collaborative Innovation Centre of Quantum Matter, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China

    Ruixi Qiao, Muhong Wu & Kaihui Liu

  7. Songshan Lake Materials Laboratory, Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guangdong, 523808, China

    Kehai Liu & Ying Fu

  8. CAS Center for Excellence in Nanoscience, CAS Key Laboratory of Nanosystem and Hierarchical Fabrication, National Center for Nanoscience and Technology, Beijing, 100190, China

    Jun He

  9. School of Physical Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    Xuedong Bai

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  1. Li Wang
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  2. Jiajie Qi
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Correspondence to Li Wang, Qunyang Li, Xuedong Bai or Kaihui Liu.

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Wang, L., Qi, J., Zhang, S. et al. Abnormal anti-oxidation behavior of hexagonal boron nitride grown on copper. Nano Res. 15, 7577–7583 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-022-4388-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-022-4388-1

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