Mechanical manipulation and exfoliation of boron nitride flakes by micro-plowing with an AFM tip

TL;DR

This paper presents a straightforward AFM-based method for mechanically manipulating and exfoliating thick boron nitride flakes into thinner, large-area, few-layer, and monolayer flakes, with characterization confirming the quality of the exfoliation.

Contribution

It introduces a simple, extendable technique for exfoliating 2D materials using AFM micro-plowing, enabling controlled thinning of boron nitride flakes.

Findings

Thick BN flakes can be thinned to monolayers.

AFM and Raman spectroscopy confirm quality of exfoliated flakes.

Method is applicable to other 2D van der Waals materials.

Abstract

We demonstrate a simple method to manipulate and exfoliate thick hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) flakes using an atomic force microscope (AFM) cantilever and tip mounted to a micromanipulator stage. Thick flakes of tens to hundreds of nanometers can be thinned down to large area, few-layer and monolayer flakes. We characterize the resulting thinned-down flakes using AFM and Raman spectroscopy. This technique is extendable to other two dimensional, van der Waals materials.