Abstract
Ultrathin materials often require high temperatures for growth and processing, which cannot be withstood by the substrate underneath. For example, polymers are widely used as a supporting layer but unfortunately have low strain-point temperatures. This is the case of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) which has glass transition and melting temperatures of 76 and 250 °C, respectively. In this paper we propose to use polished salt, a material that can withstand high temperatures during fabrication and, at the same time, can be sacrificed during the transfer onto the final substrates. More specifically, we demonstrate thermal dewetting of Au ultrathin metal films and growth of MoS2 on NaCl at 750 and 650 °C, respectively, and subsequent transfer onto PET films, after which the salt is easily dissolved by water. We believe that the proposed technique can be extended to fabrication of other ultrathin materials, e.g. graphene, as well as final substrates for a wide range of applications, including flexible electronic and optoelectronic devices.
Highlights
Ultrathin materials often require high temperatures for growth and processing, which cannot be withstood by the substrate underneath
The great interest of such materials stems from their remarkable properties arising from the quantum confinement, electrical transport and optical effects that emerge when scaled to very low thicknesses, which is of particular interest for optoelectronic applications
The 2D materials portfolio has been expanded to, for example, hexagonal boron nitride[3], transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs)[4,5,6,7], layered double hydroxides (LDHs)[8], and different 2D heterostructures resulting from the combination of previous materials in a vertical stack due to van der Waals forces[9]
Summary
Ultrathin materials often require high temperatures for growth and processing, which cannot be withstood by the substrate underneath. Due to the aforementioned properties, MoS2 has already found application in FETs11,16, catalysis[17,18,19], energy storage[20] and sensors[21] with recent work demonstrating potential for flexible electronics applications[11,13,22,23] Another material of interest in optoelectronics is ultrathin metal films (UTMFs), with thicknesses below 10 nanometers, which have been widely studied due to their interesting electrical transport and optical properties (e.g. high transmittance, good conductivity and low sheet resistance), and their easy deposition on a wide variety of substrates (e.g. rigid and flexible)[24,25]. By this method the authors demonstrated the fabrication of textured and photoactive MoS2 on NaCl
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