Catalyst-Free Growth of Two-Dimensional BCxN Materials on Dielectrics by Temperature-Dependent Plasma-Enhanced Chemical Vapor Deposition

Kongyang Yi; Zhepeng Jin; Saiyu Bu; Dingguan Wang; Donghua Liu; Yamin Huang; Yemin Dong; Qinghong Yuan; Yunqi Liu; Andrew Thye Shen Wee; Dacheng Wei

doi:10.1021/acsami.0c08555

Catalyst-Free Growth of Two-Dimensional BC_xN Materials on Dielectrics by Temperature-Dependent Plasma-Enhanced Chemical Vapor Deposition

ACS Appl Mater Interfaces. 2020 Jul 22;12(29):33113-33120. doi: 10.1021/acsami.0c08555. Epub 2020 Jul 7.

Authors

Kongyang Yi^{1

2

3}, Zhepeng Jin^{1

2}, Saiyu Bu⁴, Dingguan Wang⁵, Donghua Liu^{1

2}, Yamin Huang³, Yemin Dong³, Qinghong Yuan⁴, Yunqi Liu², Andrew Thye Shen Wee⁵, Dacheng Wei^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Molecular Engineering of Polymers, Department of Macromolecular Science, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China.
² Institute of Molecular Materials and Devices, Fudan University, 200433 Shanghai, China.
³ State Key Laboratory of Functional Materials for Informatics, Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200092, China.
⁴ State Key Laboratory of Precision Spectroscopy, School of Physics and Electronic Science, East China Normal University, 3663 N. Zhongshan Road, Shanghai 200062, China.
⁵ Department of Physics, National University of Singapore, 2 Science Drive 3, Singapore 117542, Singapore.

PMID: 32574487
DOI: 10.1021/acsami.0c08555

Abstract

Traditional methods to prepare two-dimensional (2D) B-C-N ternary materials (BC_xN), such as chemical vapor deposition (CVD), require sophisticated experimental conditions such as high temperature, delicate control of precursors, and postgrowth transfer from catalytic substrates, and the products are generally thick or bulky films without the atomically mixed phase of B-C-N, hampering practical applications of these materials. Here, for the first time, we develop a temperature-dependent plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) method to grow 2D BC_xN materials directly on noncatalytic dielectrics at low temperature with high controllability. The C, N, and B compositions can be tuned by simply changing the growth temperature. Thus, the properties of the as-made materials including band gap and conductivity are modulated, which is hardly achieved by other methods. A 2D hybridized BC₂N film with a mixed BC₂N phase is produced, for the first time, with a band gap of about 2.3 eV. The growth temperature is 580-620 °C, much lower than that of traditional catalytic CVD for growing BC_xN. The product has a p-type conducting property and can be directly applied in field-effect transistors and sensors without postgrowth transfer, showing great promise for this method in future applications.

Keywords: chemical sensor; field-effect transistor; plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition; temperature dependent; transfer-free; two-dimensional BCxN.