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Characterization and manipulation of individual defects in insulating hexagonal boron nitride using scanning tunnelling microscopy

Nature Nanotechnology volume 10, pages 949–953 (2015)Cite this article

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Abstract

Defects play a key role in determining the properties and technological applications of nanoscale materials and, because they tend to be highly localized, characterizing them at the single-defect level is of particular importance. Scanning tunnelling microscopy has long been used to image the electronic structure of individual point defects in conductors1, semiconductors2,3,4 and ultrathin films5,6,7,8,9, but such single-defect electronic characterization remains an elusive goal for intrinsic bulk insulators. Here, we show that individual native defects in an intrinsic bulk hexagonal boron nitride insulator can be characterized and manipulated using a scanning tunnelling microscope. This would typically be impossible due to the lack of a conducting drain path for electrical current. We overcome this problem by using a graphene/boron nitride heterostructure, which exploits the atomically thin nature of graphene to allow the visualization of defect phenomena in the underlying bulk boron nitride. We observe three different defect structures that we attribute to defects within the bulk insulating boron nitride. Using scanning tunnelling spectroscopy we obtain charge and energy-level information for these boron nitride defect structures. We also show that it is possible to manipulate the defects through voltage pulses applied to the scanning tunnelling microscope tip.

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Figure 1: STM topography and corresponding dI/dV map for a graphene/BN device.
Figure 2: dI/dV maps and spatially dependent dI/dV spectroscopy determining the defect charge state.
Figure 3: dI/dV maps of ring defect enable energy-level characterization.
Figure 4: Manipulating defects in BN with an STM tip.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank P. Jarillo-Herrero, N. Gabor, A. Young, P. Yu and A. Rubio for discussions. This research was supported by the sp2 programme (STM measurement and device fabrication) and the LBNL Molecular Foundry (graphene growth characterization) funded by the Director, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences of the US Department of Energy (contract no. DE-AC02-05CH11231). Support was also provided by National Science Foundation award CMMI-1235361 (device characterization, image analysis). J.V.J. acknowledges support from the UC President's Postdoctoral Fellowship. D.W. was supported by the Department of Defense (DoD) through the National Defense Science & Engineering Graduate Fellowship (NDSEG) Program. S.K. acknowledges support from the Qualcomm Scholars Research Fellowship.

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Author notes

  1. Dillon Wong, Jairo Velasco and Long Ju: These authors contributed equally to this work

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, 94720, California, USA

    Dillon Wong, Jairo Velasco Jr, Long Ju, Juwon Lee, Salman Kahn, Hsin-Zon Tsai, Chad Germany, Alex Zettl, Feng Wang & Michael F. Crommie

  2. National Institute for Materials Science, 1-1 Namiki, Tsukuba, 305-0044, Japan

    Takashi Taniguchi & Kenji Watanabe

  3. Materials Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, 94720, California, USA

    Alex Zettl, Feng Wang & Michael F. Crommie

  4. Kavli Energy NanoSciences Institute at the University of California, Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, 94720, California, USA

    Alex Zettl, Feng Wang & Michael F. Crommie

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  1. Dillon Wong
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Contributions

L.J. and J.V.J. conceived the work and designed the research strategy. J.V.J., D.W., S.K. and J.L. performed data analysis. J.V.J., S.K., L.J. and A.Z. facilitated sample fabrication. D.W., J.L. and J.V.J. carried out STM/ scanning tunnelling spectroscopy (STS) measurements. J.V.J. and S.K. carried out electron transport measurements. K.W. and T.T. synthesized the hBN samples. D.W., J.V.J. and L.J. formulated the theoretical model with advice from F.W. and M.F.C. M.F.C. supervised the STM/STS experiments. J.V.J., D.W. and M.F.C. co-wrote the manuscript. J.V.J. and M.F.C. coordinated the collaboration. All authors discussed the results and commented on the paper.

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Correspondence to Michael F. Crommie.

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Wong, D., Velasco, J., Ju, L. et al. Characterization and manipulation of individual defects in insulating hexagonal boron nitride using scanning tunnelling microscopy. Nature Nanotech 10, 949–953 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2015.188

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