One-Pot Confined Epitaxial Growth of 2D Heterostructure Arrays

D. Geng, I. Abdelwahab, X. Xiao, A. Cernescu, W. Fu, V. Giannini, S. A. Maier, L. Li, W. Hu, K. Ping Loh and H. Ying Yang

ACS Materials Lett., 3, 2, 217–223 (2021)
Graphene and hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) have attracted intensive interests in very recent years because of their unique physical and chemical properties. With similar crystal structures, graphene and h-BN pose great potential for constructing interesting heterostructures. Here, one-pot confined synthesis of large-area graphene/h-BN in-plane heterostructure arrays via sequential edge-epitaxy is first realized on liquid Cu surface. Extensive characterizations confirm the in-plane continuity between graphene and h-BN for the synthesized heterostructures. With increased growth time, the heterostructure arrays can be turned into a uniform centimeter-scale graphene/h-BN monolayer film. Furthermore, the plasmonic characteristics of the heterostructures are investigated and utilized to evaluate the quality of the hybrid structures. Our work demonstrates the designability of CVD process for large-area synthesis of graphene/h-BN heterostructures arrays, which might be generally applied to other 2D materials.