Large-area epitaxial growth of curvature-stabilized ABC trilayer graphene.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 31992694.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-019-14022-3 and PMC identifier 6987307.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
The properties of van der Waals (vdW) materials often vary dramatically with the atomic stacking order between layers, but this order can be difficult to control. Trilayer graphene (TLG) stacks in either a semimetallic ABA or a semiconducting ABC configuration with a gate-tunable band gap, but the latter has only been produced by exfoliation. Here we present a chemical vapor deposition approach to TLG growth that yields greatly enhanced fraction and size of ABC domains. The key insight is that substrate curvature can stabilize ABC domains. Controllable ABC yields ~59% were achieved by tailoring substrate curvature levels. ABC fractions remained high after transfer to device substrates, as confirmed by transport measurements revealing the expected tunable ABC band gap. Substrate topography engineering provides a path to large-scale synthesis of epitaxial ABC-TLG and other vdW materials.