Fabrication of nanopores in polycrystalline boron-nitride nanosheet by using Si, SiC and diamond clusters bombardment

Abstract

In this paper, molecular dynamic simulations have been performed to fabricate nanopores in a polycrystalline boron-nitride nanosheet applied to DNA sequencer devices by using Si clusters bombardment. Three different sizes of Si clusters with ten different kinetic energies and impacts at five different locations of the polycrystalline boron-nitride nanosheet have been simulated. Our results show that desired nanopores with expected size and topography can be created by controlling the kinetic energy and size of the cluster. The area size of nanopores also increase by rising the kinetic energy of the cluster. We have also observed that the existing grain boundary in the incident location highly affects the shape and size of the nanopores. Therefore, we subsequently applied an external tensile strain on the boron-nitride nanosheet and determined the effect of straining nanosheet on the area, quality and the shape of fabricated nanopores. We find that increasing the external tensile strain leads to a large increase in the area of nanopores, but the shape and quality of fabricated nanopores remains nearly unaffected, particularly compared to drilling nanopores in the unstrained nanosheet. In order to investigate the effect of the cluster type, two new type of clusters (SiC and diamond) have been used to generate nanopores. Our results reveal that SiC and diamond clusters bombardment lead to fabricate almost the same shape and quality of nanopores as well as the Si cluster. On the other hand, increasing the kinetic energy of the SiC and diamond cluster barely influences the area size of the nanopores. Among all clusters, the diamond cluster bombardment leads to fabricate the largest average area size of the nanopores.