On the nature of wettability of van der Waals heterostructures

TL;DR

This study investigates how van der Waals forces influence the wettability of 2D heterostructures, revealing that substrate effects dominate and that these surfaces are intrinsically dispersive with limited electric field control of wetting.

Contribution

It provides experimental evidence linking van der Waals forces to wettability in 2D heterostructures and highlights the dominant substrate influence on their wetting properties.

Findings

Van der Waals forces significantly influence wettability of 2D heterostructures.

Substrate effects dominate the wetting behavior of these materials.

Electric field application does not notably change contact angles despite resistance changes.

Abstract

Wetting behaviour of surfaces is believed to be affected by van der Waals (vdW) forces, however, there is no clear demonstration of this. With the isolation of two-dimensional vdW layered materials it is possible to test this hypothesis. In this paper, we report the wetting behaviour of vdW heterostructures which include, chemical vapor deposition (CVD) grown graphene, molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) and tungsten disulfide (WS2) on few layers of hexagon boron nitride (h-BN) and SiO2/Si. Our study clearly shows that while this class of two-dimensional materials are not wetting transparent, there seems to be a significant amount of influence on their wetting properties by the underlying substrate due to dominant vdW forces. Contact angle measurements indicate that graphene and graphene-like layered transitional metal dichalcogenides invariably have intrinsically dispersive surfaces with a dominating London-vdW force-mediated wettability. Electric field controlled wetting studies of MoS2/WS2/SiO2/Si heterostructures were performed and no notable changes to the water contact angle was seen with applied voltage although two orders of magnitude change in resistance was observed. We postulate that the highly dispersive nature of these surfaces arising from the predominant London-vdW forces could be the reason for such observation.