The realization of high-performance nanoelectronics requires control of materials at the nanoscale. Methods to produce high quality epitaxial graphene (EG) nanostructures on silicon carbide are known. The next step is to grow van der Waals semiconductors on top of EG nanostructures. Hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) is a wide bandgap semiconductor with a honeycomb lattice structure that matches that of graphene, making it ideally suited for graphene-based nanoelectronics. Here, we describe the preparation and characterization of multilayer h-BN grown epitaxially on EG using a migration-enhanced metalorganic vapor phase epitaxy process. As a result of the lateral epitaxial deposition (LED) mechanism, the grown h-BN/EG heterostructures have highly ordered epitaxial interfaces, as desired in order to preserve the transport properties of pristine graphene. Atomic scale structural and energetic details of the observed row-by-row growth mechanism of the two-dimensional (2D) epitaxial h-BN film are analyzed through first-principles simulations, demonstrating one-dimensional nucleation-free-energy-barrierless growth. This industrially relevant LED process can be applied to a wide variety of van der Waals materials.
Keywords: MOVPE; ab initio calculations; boron nitride; epitaxial growth; graphene; silicon carbide; van der Waals heterostructures.