Epitaxial 2D Materials

We investigate the epitaxial growth of two-dimensional materials, with the aim to optimise their quality, such that emergent properties of van der Waals heterostructures can be examined.

Graphene is only the first of a large number of two-dimensional (2D) materials with a broad range of physical properties. This includes insulators, semiconductors, metals as well as superconductors. Some of them moreover exhibit intriguing properties such as strong spin-orbit coupling or non-trivial topologies.

Because 2D materials are held together by van der Waals interactions only, one is relieved from lattice-matching constraints and can create completely new artificial materials, not only by stacking arbitrary (monolayer) sequences, but also by carefully controlling the twist angle between the layers. Through this design principle, van der Waals heterostructures permit a degree of tailoring material properties that is otherwise difficult to achieve. Specifically, we develop new approaches to twisted bilayer graphene on SiC(0001) [1, 2] (for details see Graphene), and study the interfaces between molecules and 2D materials [3].

Hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) is a prominent and frequently studied 2D material, because it has a large bandgap of almost 6 eV, making it an insulator. Growing high-quality hBN on metal surfaces [4, 5, 6] offers the possibility to fabricate atomically thin insulating layers.