Recently, Prof. ZHANG Kai ’s research group from Suzhou Institute of Nano-Tech and Nano-Bionics(SINANO),Chinese Academy of Sciences(CAS) cooperated with Prof. Anlian Pan (Hunan University) and Prof. HE Jun (Wuhan University) have reported, for the first time, the growth of single-crystal black phosphorus and its alloy films. The research results were published online on the journal Nature Materials with the title " Growth of single-crystal black phosphorus and its alloy films through sustained feedstock release " (DOI : 10.1038/s41563-023-01516-1).
Black phosphorus (BP), a fascinating semiconductor with high mobility and tunable direct bandgap, has emerged as a candidate beyond traditional silicon-based devices for next-generation electronics and optoelectronics. The ability to grow large-scale, high-quality BP films is a prerequisite for scalable integrated applications but has thus far remained a challenge.
In this work, ZHANG’s group devised a controllable sustained feedstock release strategy for the growth of single-crystal black phosphorus (SCBP) films, inspired by the sustained drug release technique. Both experiments and density functional theory (DFT) calculations demonstrate that the proposed design enables significantly reduced nucleation density and maintains the layer-by-layer lateral growth dynamics, finally leading to the growth of SCBP films. The perfect single-crystal nature of the SCBP films allows excellent device performance with a mobility of up to 6500 cm2 V1 s1 and enables the observation of SdH quantum oscillations. In addition, this strategy was proven to be universal for the growth of high-quality SCBP alloy films with tunable compositions and bandgaps, further expanding the infrared emission regime of SCBP films from 3.7 μm to 6.9 μm at room-temperature.
This work will endow BP family materials with more competitive advantages toward the next-generation for electronics and optoelectronics, especially for high-performance infrared optoelectronic devices. Cheng Chen, Yuling Yin and Rencong Zhang are co-first authors of this paper. Prof. ZHANG Kai, Prof. PAN Anlian and Prof. HE Jun are the co-corresponding authors. This research was financially supported by the National Key Research and Development Program, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Jiangsu Province Key R&D Program.
Original link for the paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41563-023-01516-1
Fig.1 Growth of SCBP film by a sustained feedstock release strategy.
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