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  • Primer
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Van der Waals heterostructures

Nature Reviews Methods Primers volume 2, Article number: 58 (2022) Cite this article

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Abstract

The integration of dissimilar materials into heterostructures has become a powerful tool for engineering interfaces and electronic structure. The advent of 2D materials has provided unprecedented opportunities for novel heterostructures in the form of van der Waals stacks, laterally stitched 2D layers and more complex layered and 3D architectures. This Primer provides an overview of state-of-the-art methodologies for producing such van der Waals heterostructures, focusing on the two fundamentally different strategies, top-down deterministic assembly and bottom-up synthesis. Successful techniques, advantages and limitations are discussed for both approaches. As important as the fabrication itself is the characterization of the resulting engineered materials, for which a range of analysis techniques covering structure, composition and emerging functionality are highlighted. Examples of the properties of artificial van der Waals structures include optoelectronics and plasmonics, twistronics and unique functionality arising from the generalization of van der Waals assembly from 2D to 3D crystalline components. Finally, current issues of reproducibility, limitations and opportunities for future breakthroughs in terms of enhanced homogeneity, interfacial purity, feature control and ultimately orders-of-magnitude increased complexity of van der Waals heterostructures are discussed.

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Fig. 1: Epitaxial heterostructures of 3D crystals and van der Waals heterostructures.
Fig. 2: Working principle of gold-film-assisted exfoliation and examples of exfoliated 2D crystals.
Fig. 3: Main steps of processes for assembly of Van der Waals stacks.
Fig. 4: CVD approaches for producing multi-junction heterostructures and superlattices.
Fig. 5: Bottom-up synthesis approaches with control over interlayer twist.
Fig. 6: Characterization of van der Waals heterostructures.
Fig. 7: Plasmonic response of graphene based van der Waals heterostructures.

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Acknowledgements

P.S. and E.S. acknowledge support from the National Science Foundation, Division of Materials Research, Solid State and Materials Chemistry Program under grant number DMR-1607795 (twisted nanowire synthesis and diffraction analysis), the Department of the Navy, Office of Naval Research under ONR award number N00014-20-1-2305 (twisted nanowire optoelectronics), and the US Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences, under award number DE-SC0016343 (synthesis of twisted stacks, development of STEM-CL spectroscopy). J.Q. acknowledges financial support from the Agencia Estatal de Investigación of Spain (grant number PID2019-106820RB) and from Universidad Complutense de Madrid and the European Commission (MSCA COFUND UNA4CAREER project number 4129252). A.C.-G. acknowledges funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research And Innovation Program (grant agreement number 755655, ERC-StG 2017 project 2D-TOPSENSE), the EU FLAG-ERA project To2Dox (JTC-2019-009), the Comunidad de Madrid through the CAIRO-CM project (Y2020/NMT-6661) and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (grant number PID2020-118078RB-I00). Y.H. acknowledges support from the National Key Research and Development Program of China (grant numbers 2019YFA0308000 and 2018YFA0704201), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NNSFC grant numbers 62022089 and 11874405), Chongqing Outstanding Youth Fund (grant number 2021ZX0400005) and the Strategic Priority Research Program (B) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (grant number XDB33000000). X.D. acknowledges financial support by the Office of Naval Research through grant number N00014-18-1-2707. H.R.G. acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation (grant number DMR-1557434). Z.F. is supported by the National Science Foundation (grant number DMR-1945560).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Materials Science Factory, Instituto de Ciencia de Materiales de Madrid (ICMM-CSIC), Madrid, Spain

    Andres Castellanos-Gomez

  2. Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Xiangfeng Duan & Qi Qian

  3. California NanoSystems Institute, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Xiangfeng Duan

  4. Department of Physics and Astronomy, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA

    Zhe Fei

  5. Ames Laboratory, US Department of Energy, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA

    Zhe Fei

  6. Department of Physics, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA

    Humberto Rodriguez Gutierrez

  7. Advanced Research Institute of Multidisciplinary Science, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China

    Yuan Huang & Xinyu Huang

  8. GISC, Departamento de Física de Materiales, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

    Jorge Quereda

  9. Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, USA

    Eli Sutter

  10. Nebraska Center for Materials and Nanoscience, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, USA

    Eli Sutter

  11. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, USA

    Peter Sutter

Authors
  1. Andres Castellanos-Gomez
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  2. Xiangfeng Duan
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  3. Zhe Fei
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  4. Humberto Rodriguez Gutierrez
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Contributions

Introduction (P.S.); Experimentation (A.C.-G., H.R.G., Y.H., X.H., J.Q., E.S. and P.S.); Results (H.R.G., E.S. and P.S.); Applications (A.C.-G., X.D., Z.F., Y.H., X.H., J.Q., Q.Q., E.S. and P.S.); Reproducibility and data deposition (A.C.-G., H.R.G., J.Q. and P.S.); Limitations and optimizations (A.C.-G., H.R.G., J.Q. and P.S.); Outlook (A.C.-G., X.D., H.R.G., J.Q., E.S. and P.S.).

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Correspondence to Peter Sutter.

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Glossary

Quantum wells

Layer with locally reduced confining potential for electrons and/or holes, sandwiched between barrier layers with higher potential energy for the charge carriers.

Epitaxial heterostructures

Integrated dissimilar 3D crystalline (non-layered) materials with the same or a similar crystal structure and low lattice mismatch, usually formed via crystal growth or deposition processes, where the crystal orientation of each subsequent component is dictated by the underlying lattice.

Exfoliation

Isolation of a 2D or few-layer flake by peeling of one or more layers from a layered bulk crystal, often involving an adhesive tape whose interaction with the topmost layers of the crystal is stronger than the interlayer interaction.

Micromechanical assembly

Process of stacking of 2D flakes, where the relative position and orientation is precisely controlled by suitable manipulators such as micrometre- or piezo stages.

Spin-coated

A process for coating flat substrates with thin films, involving the application of a small drop of the liquid coating solution in the centre of the substrate followed by the uniform spreading of the material by spinning of the substrate at high rotation frequency.

Axial twisting

Twisting of a ribbon-like 2D or layered crystal around its symmetry axis, continuously changing its orientation and thereby shaping it into the third dimension.

Eshelby twist

Crystal rotation in thin whiskers or nanowires due to a torque between their ends, induced by a screw dislocation (a linear lattice defect) along their symmetry axis.

Moiré potential

A periodic modulation of the local potential by a moiré pattern, notably the twist moiré in twisted van der Waals stacks.

Dirac cones

Cone-shaped, linearly dispersing low-energy valence and conduction bands that meet at a single point at/near the Fermi level, found in graphene and related materials.

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Castellanos-Gomez, A., Duan, X., Fei, Z. et al. Van der Waals heterostructures. Nat Rev Methods Primers 2, 58 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43586-022-00139-1

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