Crystallogprahically selective nanopatterning of graphene on SiO2

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a method for anisotropic dry etching of graphene on SiO2 that selectively creates zigzag edges, enabling precise patterning of graphene nanoribbons for nanoelectronic applications.

Contribution

It introduces a novel anisotropic dry etching process that selectively produces zigzag edges in graphene ribbons, advancing nanoscale patterning techniques.

Findings

Achieved selective etching of zigzag edges in graphene

Controlled the starting points for carbon removal with high precision

Produced graphene nanoribbons suitable for electronic applications

Abstract

Graphene has many advantageous properties, but its lack of an electronic band gap makes this two dimensional material impractical for many nanoelectronic applications, for example field effect transistors. This problem can be circumvented by opening up a confinement induced gap, through the patterning of graphene into ribbons having widths of a few nanometres. The electronic properties of such ribbons depend on their size and the crystallographic orientation of the ribbon edges. Therefore, etching processes that are able to differentiate between the zigzag and armchair type edge terminations of graphene are highly sought after. In this contribution we show that such an anisotropic, dry etching reaction is possible and we use it to obtain graphene ribbons with zigzag edges. We demonstrate that the starting positions for the carbon removal reaction can be tailored at will with precision.