Recent progress in the assembly of nanodevices and van der Waals heterostructures by deterministic placement of 2D materials

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent advances in the precise layer-by-layer assembly of 2D materials into van der Waals heterostructures, highlighting new deterministic placement techniques and their applications in complex device fabrication.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive comparison of deterministic placement methods and discusses their potential for creating complex, integrated 2D material-based devices and structures.

Findings

Comparison of various deterministic placement techniques.

Demonstration of complex heterostructure fabrication.

Potential for integration with photonic and electronic technologies.

Abstract

Designer heterostructures can now be assembled layer-by-layer with unmatched precision thanks to the recently developed deterministic placement methods to transfer two-dimensional (2D) materials. This possibility constitutes the birth of a very active research field on the so-called van der Waals heterostructures. Moreover, these deterministic placement methods also open the door to fabricate complex devices, which would be otherwise very difficult to achieve by conventional bottom-up nanofabrication approaches, and to fabricate fully-encapsulated devices with exquisite electronic properties. The integration of 2D materials with existing technologies such as photonic and superconducting waveguides and fiber optics is another exciting possibility. Here, we review the state-of-the-art of the deterministic placement methods, describing and comparing the different alternative methods available in the literature and we illustrate their potential to fabricate van der Waals heterostructures, to integrate 2D materials into complex devices and to fabricate artificial bilayer structures where the layers present a user-defined rotational twisting angle.