Unraveling the 3D Atomic Structure of a Suspended Graphene/hBN van der Waals Heterostructure.
basic_science · Level V
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- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 28140602.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1021/acs.nanolett.6b04360 and PMC identifier 5345117.
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Abstract
In this work we demonstrate that a free-standing van der Waals heterostructure, usually regarded as a flat object, can exhibit an intrinsic buckled atomic structure resulting from the interaction between two layers with a small lattice mismatch. We studied a freely suspended membrane of well-aligned graphene on a hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) monolayer by transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and scanning TEM (STEM). We developed a detection method in the STEM that is capable of recording the direction of the scattered electron beam and that is extremely sensitive to the local stacking of atoms. A comparison between experimental data and simulated models shows that the heterostructure effectively bends in the out-of-plane direction, producing an undulated structure having a periodicity that matches the moiré wavelength. We attribute this rippling to the interlayer interaction and also show how this affects the intralayer strain in each layer.