Growth and characterization of Graphene and 2-dimensional materials

Chemical Vapour Deposition (CVD) has emerged as a workhorse for the production of graphene [1,2] and more recently applied in the synthesis of other 2D materials such as hexagonal Boron Nitride [3] and Molybdenum Disulphide [4]. In this talk, I will present an overview of our tool and process capabilities via CVD to synthesize graphene and hexagonal Boron Nitride (hBN) and plasma enhanced CVD techniques to synthesize nanocrystalline grapheme (NCG) and vertically grown graphene. The synthesized structures were characterized using Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM), Raman spectroscopy and X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS). The range of 2 dimensional nanostructures grown by this technique demonstrates the versatility of chemical vapour deposition based routes for the fabrication of these materials. In addition, I will present a novel SEM based technique to rapidly measure the thickness of novel 2D materials such as MoS2 to reliably distinguish between the presence of one versus two layers and multiple layer and measure layer thickness below 1nm. 

References:
[1] 	Li, X et al. Large-area synthesis of high-quality and uniform graphene films on copper foils. Science 324, 1312-1314 (2009)
[2] 	Bae, S. et al. Roll-to-roll production of 30-inch graphene films for transparent electrodes. Nat Nanotech. 5, 574 (2010)
[3] 	Ismach, A. et al. Toward the Controlled Synthesis of Hexagonal Boron Nitride Films. ACS Nano. 6, 6378 (2012)
[4] 	Zhan, Y et al. Large-Area Vapor-Phase Growth and Characterization of MoS2 Atomic Layers on a SiO2 Substrate. Small, 8, 966 (2012).