Beyond Graphene - Design, Growth, and Characterization of Alternative 2-Dimensional Materials

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The discovery of two-dimensional materials, or planar sheets that are 1 (or several) atom(s) thick, in recent years has generated tremendous excitement and research activity. Graphene, hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN), and transition metal dichalcogenides (TMD's) have garnered the lion share of attention and progress has been made in the development of novel electronic, optical and energy applications with these materials. 2-D materials face two critical challenges for their practical use in technology: 1) Each material (like their 3-D allotropes) has specific properties that may limit their use. For example, since graphene does not have a band gap, its use is limited for sensing or switching applications in electronic devices. This has led to nascent work (with superlative properties predicted by computational methods) on alternative 2-D materials, like silicene, germanene and phosphorene, which have been subsequently synthesized in some manner. 2) 2-D materials are not easy to grow at large scale and pose integration challenges for manufacturing workflows. Many of the vanguard experimental results reported on were the result of mechanical exfoliation. Since then, considerable advances in chemical-vapor deposition growth, chemical exfoliation, and other preparations have been developed. However, for alternative 2-D materials, very little work exits.******The aim of this research program is to develop a novel, scaleable method to grow the alternative 2-dimensional materials silicene, phosphorene, and germanene using ion implantation. Recent work showed that the implantation of carbon into copper, followed by a subsequent anneal results in the development of a high-quality graphene layer on the copper surface [1]. This proposal intends to extend this to other Group IV 2-D materials. During this study, we will develop 1) appropriate growth methods to fabricate wafer-scale silicene, germanene, and phosphorene, 2) a computational and thermodynamic model that describes the chemistry of ion implantation and self-assembly of 2-D layers and 3) the advanced characterization of the atomic, electronic, and chemical structure of these materials using transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and 4) integration into baseline electronic devices. These findings can ultimately provide us in-depth knowledge of the fundamental processes of implant chemistry, a mechanism for ion implantation to fabricate scaleable novel 2-D materials, and interesting new materials for further study. Ultimately, successful growth of these new materials could lead to faster and more sensitive electronic devices and, in the case of silicene and germanene, could be integrated (as compared to graphene) into already-existing semiconductor workflows. There is potential to for commercial advances in the Canadian semiconductor manufacturing sector and for training high quality scientists as a result of this research.