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Chemical vapor deposition growth of large-scale hexagonal boron nitride with controllable orientation

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Abstract

Chemical vapor deposition (CVD) synthesis of large-domain hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) with a uniform thickness is very challenging, mainly due to the extremely high nucleation density of this material. Herein, we report the successful growth of wafer-scale, high-quality h-BN monolayer films that have large single-crystalline domain sizes, up to ~72 µm in edge length, prepared using a folded Cu-foil enclosure. The highly confined growth space and the smooth Cu surface inside the enclosure effectively reduced the precursor feeding rate together and induced a drastic decrease in the nucleation density. The orientation of the as-grown h-BN monolayer was found to be strongly correlated to the crystallographic orientation of the Cu substrate: the Cu (111) face being the best substrate for growing aligned h-BN domains and even single-crystalline monolayers. This is consistent with our density functional theory calculations. The present study offers a practical pathway for growing high-quality h-BN films by deepening our fundamental understanding of the process of their growth by CVD.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Nanochemistry (CNC), Beijing Science and Engineering Center for Low Dimensional Carbon Materials, Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences, College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering, Academy for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China

    Xiuju Song, Yufeng Nie, Teng Gao, Jingyu Sun, Donglin Ma, Qiucheng Li, Yubin Chen, Yanfeng Zhang & Zhongfan Liu

  2. Department of Materials Science and Engineering, College of Engineering, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China

    Yanfeng Zhang

  3. Institute of Textiles and Clothing, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China

    Junfeng Gao & Feng Ding

  4. State Key Laboratory of Silicon Materials, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310027, China

    Chuanhong Jin

  5. Centre of Polymer and Carbon Materials, Polish Academy of Sciences, M. Curie-Sklodowskiej 34, Zabrze, 41-819, Poland

    Alicja Bachmatiuk

  6. Department of Energy Science, Department of Physics, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon, 440-746, Republic of Korea

    Mark H. Rümmeli

  7. IBS Center for Integrated Nanostructure Physics, Institute for Basic Science (IBS), Daejon, 305-701, Republic of Korea

    Mark H. Rümmeli

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  1. Xiuju Song
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  2. Junfeng Gao
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  3. Yufeng Nie
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  4. Teng Gao
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  5. Jingyu Sun
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  6. Donglin Ma
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  7. Qiucheng Li
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  8. Yubin Chen
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  9. Chuanhong Jin
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  11. Mark H. Rümmeli
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  12. Feng Ding
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  13. Yanfeng Zhang
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Correspondence to Feng Ding, Yanfeng Zhang or Zhongfan Liu.

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Song, X., Gao, J., Nie, Y. et al. Chemical vapor deposition growth of large-scale hexagonal boron nitride with controllable orientation. Nano Res. 8, 3164–3176 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-015-0816-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-015-0816-9

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