Recently, the team of Fu Qiang, a researcher from the State Key Laboratory of Catalysis, Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and TSMC ’s Lain-JongLi team, Taiwan Jiaotong University ’s Wen-Hao Chang team, Rice University ’s BIYakobson team, and Peking University ’s professor Zhang Yanfeng Teamwork, successfully epitaxially grown a single-crystal hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) single-layer thin film on a 2-inch wafer substrate.
Hexagonal boron nitride is an important type of two-dimensional semiconductor layered material. How to achieve the controlled growth of single-crystal hexagonal boron nitride thin films on wafers is a key challenge for hexagonal boron nitride in integrated circuits in the future. The researchers grew a single-crystal copper film with a grain orientation of (111) on a sapphire substrate as a substrate to further prepare fully ordered hexagonal boron nitride wafers. The characterization and confirmation of the single crystal properties of large-area single-layer thin film structures is a recognized problem in the study of two-dimensional materials. With the help of the deep ultraviolet laser PEEM / LEEM equipment developed by the laboratory, the researchers used their unique surface micro-area imaging and diffraction functions to select nearly one hundred micron-sized micro-areas on the 1-inch wafer surface for structural analysis and experiments. The results confirmed that the orientation of the hexagonal boron nitride film and the Cu (111) substrate surface were completely consistent, confirming the single-crystal characteristics of the single-layer film.
Related achievements were published in Nature. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China Science Center Project, the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Strategic Leading Science and Technology Special Category B “Essence and Control of Energy Chemical Conversion”, and the National Major Scientific Research Equipment Development Project.