Application-Driven Synthesis and Characterization of Hexagonal Boron Nitride on Metal and Carbon Nanotube Substrates

TL;DR

This paper presents a method for synthesizing high-quality, single- and few-layer hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) on metal and carbon nanotube substrates using chemical vapor deposition, highlighting its potential for scalable electronic applications.

Contribution

It demonstrates scalable CVD synthesis of h-BN on single crystal platinum and CNTs, with improved film quality and reusability of substrates, and explores its protective and conformal applications.

Findings

h-BN on single crystal Pt has lower roughness and higher homogeneity

Reusability of platinum foils without degradation

Monolayer h-BN effectively protects MoS2 at high temperatures

Abstract

Hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) is unique among two-dimensional materials, with a large band gap (~6 eV) and high thermal conductivity (>400 W/m/K), second only to diamond among electrical insulators. Most electronic studies to date have relied on h-BN exfoliated from bulk crystals; however, for scalable applications the material must be synthesized by methods such as chemical vapor deposition (CVD). Here, we demonstrate single- and few-layer h-BN synthesized by CVD on single crystal platinum and on carbon nanotube (CNT) substrates, also comparing these films with h-BN deposited on the more commonly used polycrystalline Pt and Cu growth substrates. The h-BN film grown on single crystal Pt has a lower surface roughness and is more spatially homogeneous than the film from a polycrystalline Pt foil, and our electrochemical transfer process allows for these expensive foils to be reused with no measurable degradation. In addition, we demonstrate monolayer h-BN as an ultrathin, 3.33 $\unicode{x212B}$ barrier protecting MoS2 from damage at high temperatures and discuss other applications that take advantage of the conformal h-BN deposition on various substrates demonstrated in this work.