Wrinkle-Free Graphene Films on Fluorinated Self-Assembled Monolayer-Modified Substrates for Enhancing the Electrical Performance of Transistors

Abstract

Self-assembled monolayer (SAM)-functionalized substrates are widely used for tailoring the electronic properties (i.e., p- and n-type doping) of two-dimensional materials, which might suppress the charge scattering, impurities, and wrinkles that can severely decline electrical properties. The fluorinated self-assembled monolayer (FSAM) is also used for promoting electrical properties by eliminating the small number of water molecules/residues between the substrate and graphene during the typical wet transfer process. However, taking graphene as an example, most of the graphene/SAM or graphene/FSAM studies are focused on the enhancement of their electrical properties and lack investigation on their surface morphology after transfer and the correlation between them. Herein, a strategy is discovered in which FSAM-modified substrates help construct a wrinkle-free graphene film with the dry transfer process due to the low surface energy between the graphene and FSAM. Trichloro(1H,1H,2H,2H-perfluorooctyl)silane (FDTS) was selected as a precursor toward the formation of the monolayer and highly uniform FSAM using a facile dip-coating route, which is feasible on versatile substrates such as Si, SiO2/Si, and poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET). The surface roughness of the FSAM-modified SiO2 substrate reduces from 2.98 to 0.13 nm. Therefore, the lower surface energy (from 60.80 to 8.12 mN/m) was found to enhance the carrier mobility of the transferred graphene by about 1.77 times, increasing from 894.6 to 1588 cm2/(V·s). Furthermore, a top-gated field-effect transistor based on graphene/FSAM was fabricated and characterized in which the FSAM decouples from the strong substrate interference and significantly improved the field-effect mobility by up to 17 times compared to that of graphene without substrate modification. Thus, this work provides a facile strategy to avoid wrinkle defects and suppress charge scattering through the decoupling from the substrate, which could be applied to other two-dimensional (2D) materials for improving their electrical performance on transistors and flexible electronics.